33o POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



or peace until all this folk-lore had been subjected to scientific test ; and 

 it looks now as if the educational world was on the eve of a period of 

 stress and struggle in the effort to examine the character of the 

 foundations upon which all our theory and practise are built. The 

 National Educational Association has established a fund for research; 

 a society for the scientific study of education has been formed in our 

 country; two or three of the universities have established chairs of 

 educational research; a number of men have put themselves into 

 training for the new work; and these are but preliminary signs of 

 the impending revolution in the treatment of education. 



And we shall need to start practically at the beginning in our 

 research. Much, perhaps most, of contemporary educational opinion is 

 in dispute, and we can not be certain where the truth lies. Take such 

 a simple matter as the teaching of the three K's; while we are agreed 

 that every child should gain some familiarity with these branches, 

 yet we have the most diverse theories as to at what age we should 

 introduce him to them, just what he should get from each, whether 

 they should be acquired in isolation or correlated with other branches, 

 how they may be most economically mastered, and so on ad libitum. 

 For the asking, and even without it, we can get all sorts of opinions on 

 these problems from all sorts of persons from college presidents up and 

 down ; but who among all these has resolved any one of these well-nigh 

 infinitely complex questions into its elements, as scientific procedure 

 demands, and observed it under varying conditions, so that its precise 

 value could be determined ? ' Common sense ' does not realize that 

 these problems are complex ; it catches some shallow, immaterial aspect 

 of any situation, and jumps to the easiest conclusion, missing most of 

 the vital factors of the problem. Much of our traditional educational 

 theory has been established in this way; it is in some such condition 

 to-day, as natural science was when Bacon began applying exact meth- 

 ods to the study of natural phenomena. We have a great deal of hear- 

 say knowledge about human development; but when one attempts to 

 administer educational forces with precision, certainty and efficiency, 

 he realizes how much guesswork there is in current pedagogical opinion. 

 Science is only just beginning to touch questions of development at all ; 

 men in all fields of living nature have been concerned primarily with 

 mature things, analyzing and dissecting and classifying. Even medi- 

 cine has given us little of value regarding the healthful physical de- 

 velopment of a human being. We have almost no precise knowledge 

 respecting problems of food, clothing, sleep, exercise, the effects of 

 school-life and the like upon an individual at different periods in his 

 development. We have an unlimited body of conflicting lay opinion 

 upon these matters, and a considerable body of conflicting expert (?) 

 opinion as well; but if a layman who has children to bring up, say, 



