8o2 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



will bring the teacher into broadest sympathy with child-nature, 

 and will enable him to affect peculiar natures and dispositions in 

 such manner as to establish wholesome and desirable ways of ac- 

 tion. It certainly is not true that the teacher is made a machine 

 by work of this character ; on the contrary, he is brought into the 

 highest possible freedom by finding the truth in the objects with 

 which he is to deal. How infinitely more free he becomes than 

 when he remains the creature of his own ignorance and pre- 

 conceived notions of the one formal way to deal with child-na- 

 ture! 



II. The Science of Education. It has already been said that 

 the study of psychology, for the teacher, must be of such charac- 

 ter that he will be enabled to apply it practically in the daily 

 work of instruction in the schoolroom ; for so long as it remains 

 merely theoretical he has received no benefit from it whatever, 

 at least so far as he is "professionally concerned. It follows read- 

 ily, then, that the principles of the science of education must be 

 gained simply as generalizations from the facts of psychology, 

 viewed with reference to the conscious and scientific stimulation 

 of the mind by educational agencies ; and this is all that is at- 

 tempted in this subject as the normal school has to deal with it. 

 This study is but a continuation of the study of psychology from 

 a special point of view that of finding an order or method in edu- 

 cation as determined by the facts which have been found in our 

 observation of mind phenomena. It is continually emphasized in 

 the normal school that all method in education is naturally and 

 entirely dependent upon laws of mental growth and development. 

 It is the purpose in this place to investigate the general principles 

 which underlie all right educational procedure, with the end in 

 view to lead the teacher to become conscious of the laws regulating 

 the order both of the parts of the branches of instruction and of 

 the branches themselves when they are considered with reference 

 to training the mind ; and it is believed that in this way he gains 

 a knowledge of educational method and practice so wide and 

 broad that there will be little danger of his mistaking the mechan- 

 ism of school teaching, as exemplified by some individual who 

 happens to be his instructor, for the true spirit as the body of it 

 all. The ordinary student will not readily apply principles in 

 which the concrete cases from which they are drawn are not 

 clearly apparent; but in the consideration of such processes as 

 induction, deduction, apperception, concentration, interest, atten- 

 tion, and so on, he will have no difficulty in seeing their uni- 

 versal application in all the work of instruction, especially if he 

 is led to discover their importance by his own investigation. 



There has been some objection on the part of certain philoso- 

 phers to the proposition that there is or can be a science of edu- 



