84 EDUCATIONAL THEORY 



ever be one so long as human nature develops, through cross-breeding in each 

 new generation, individual types that never were there before; so long as history 

 furnishes, in every age, novel social environments, new forms of faith, new ideals, 

 a new industrial organization, and thus new problems for the educator. 1 



Here is needful warning that no abstract formula in itself is adequate to the 

 new pupil come to school. All old principles of education must ever be newly 

 interpreted and newly applied; old formulas must grow or become outgrown. 

 They must not master, but obey, the teacher's spirit. 



It would again be to misunderstand the real service of Professor Royce's 

 contribution to suppose he had denied the possibility, or even the desirability, of 

 formulating into principles our present knowledge of how education ought to 

 proceed. It would be a self-contradictory extreme of pedagogic skepticism 

 to say that nobody knows anything about what education ought to be. The 

 organization of present knowledge concerning normative educational procedure 

 is analogous to the manuals of practice in medicine, law, and the ministry. Out 

 of their general medical, legal, and theological knowledge, the physician, lawyer, 

 and minister meet the needs of the individual cases. So out of what general 

 knowledge of right educational method he may possess, the teacher is enabled 

 more efficiently to forward the individual pupil's growth. The lack of a universal 

 science of pedagogy is no more crippling to the art of teaching than the lack of 

 universal therapeutic prescriptions to the practice of medicine, but the presence 

 of a relative, adjustable, modifiable science is serviceable in both cases. In 

 short, all principles of all sciences that apply to live organisms are subject to 

 continual modification in the application, and the lot of pedagogy is the lot of all 

 the organic normative sciences. We cannot deny the foundations of the young- 

 est of the learned professions without similarly involving the foundations of the 

 three oldest. 



Concerning the effect on a science of education of its changing data, which is 

 the real problem of Professors Dilthey and Royce, I find in a valuable recent 

 discussion of Professor O'Shea the following: " The social environment to be 

 dealt with changes in character with the evolution of the race, and varies with the 

 different races; the physical environment is modified by the locality, and so on. 

 But our general principle, as a type of educational propositions, is none the less 

 scientific because it has not just the same application in all instances, though it 

 may be less mathematical, less perspicacious, more complex and indeterminate on 

 this account." 



The looseness now evident in our conception of a normative pedagogical 

 science is, of course, due to the hitherto rather haphazard methods of observing 

 and collecting educational experience, as well as to the indefinite variety of human 

 individuals to whom the general maxims must be applied. This looseness is 

 considerably tightened in Thorndike's new book on Educational Psychology. This 

 is perhaps the largest attempt so far to apply the methods of exact science, 

 measurement, and statistics, to educational problems, and will do more than 

 volumes of opinion to bring pedagogy into good repute among scientists. Pro- 

 fessor Thorndike writes in his concluding chapter, concerning "'The Problem of 

 Education as a Science," the following: " The true general theory must be the 

 helpless one that there can be no general theory, or be made up of such extremely 

 vague conclusions as the features common to all human natures and the changes 

 everywhere desirable allow. ... A true educational science must be inductive, 

 must be made up from the study of the particular facts in answer to thousands 

 of different questions. . . . The science of education when it develops will, like 

 other sciences, rest upon direct observations of and experiments on the influence 



1 Educational Reriew, vol. i, " Is There a Science of Education, ' p. 24. 



2 Education as Adjustment, p. 13. 



