SHORT PAPER 85 



of educational institutions and methods made and reported with quantitative 

 precision. Since groups of variable facts will be the material it. studies, statistics 

 will everywhere be its handmaid. The chief duty of serious students of the 

 theory of education to-day is to form the habit of inductive study and learn the 

 logic of statistics." 1 



The time is ripe now for this inductive study; the " psychological moment " 

 has arrived. As well-wishers to the science of education, we must welcome the 

 child and adolescent study movement, the pedagogical experiment institution, 

 the work of the committees for " the organization of educational experience," and 

 the methods of exact science in educational study. 



But we cannot agree that the inductive method alone, even supplemented by 

 exact measurements, is adequate for a science of education. We know too much 

 about men already through biology, physiology, psychology, logic, esthetics, 

 ethics, sociology, and anthropology, to neglect it all for the sake of new observa- 

 tions. We must not fail to enter into the deductive labors of the educational 

 thinkers of the race, and particularly of the modern men like Alexander Bain, 

 the English and American Payne, Hinsdale, and others. Deduction must still 

 conserve what induction discovers. Only, I would say, in our deductions we 

 must look to all the sciences of man, and not, as we are too prone, to psychology 

 alone. Educational science is no longer applied psychology. For example, 

 " anthropologists have discovered that, in human childhood, whether of race or 

 individual, the hand leads the mind, so that the seat of intelligence is best reached 

 through manual training." 2 



Without recapitulating, here then briefly is our conception of the nature and 

 method of a science of education: a body of growing and adjustable knowledge 

 concerning how education ought to proceed, continuously derived deductively 

 from all the sciences of man and inductively from all the experience of the school. 

 Of such a science of society's chief undertaking, men will some day say with 

 Mackay : 



" Blessings on Science! When the earth seemed old, 

 When Faith grew doting, and our reason cold, 

 'Twas she discovered that the world was young, 

 And taught a language to its lisping tongue." 



1 Educational Psychology, pp. 163-164. 



2 W J McGee, " Strange Races of Men," World's Work, August, 1904, p. 5188. 



