88 ' ^ A^A DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 
The captains of industry have been demanding that they teach the 
boys and girls some things that they are going to have to do when they 
get out into the world. The teachers have had an idea of what con- 
stituted proper education for boys and girls based upon an old, worn- 
out pedagogy. Ten years ago people began to discover that they could 
apply to the processes of education some of the processes that the world 
has already been applying to the sciences; that is, that they could in- 
vestigate the operation of children's minds. So there have been three 
forces actively at work in the last ten years: experimental psychology, 
in which they experiment upon the children's minds; child study, in 
which they devote their time, carefully and thoughtfully, to the study 
of thousands of children, to discover how their minds work; and physio- 
logical psychology, in which they base their judgment of the operation of 
the mind somewhat upon the operation of the body. These have revo- 
lutionized the so-called laws of education. 
Now, you gentlemen possibly have not been as interested in this 
phase of the question as I have, but I will tell you that the educators 
who are in touch with the new conception of schools and schooling 
stand side by side with the other two classes of people that I have been 
mentioning: the great mass of common people and the leaders in in- 
dustrial lines. They are ready to say that some of the things that the 
common people have been demanding should be taught, and that, pure- 
ly from the standpoint of what is best for the growth of the mind, re- 
gardless of the child's future business capacity, we need a revision of our 
courses of study, and different material and different processes upon 
which the children shall partially expend their time in the public 
schools. We have passed the time when educators set as an aim in 
education the gathering of information, and have reached the point 
where education means anything and everything that will adjust the 
individual to his future environment and enable him to solve the prob- 
lems of his surroundings in such a way that he will live the greatest 
life for himself, for mankind and for God. 
When we come to consider the education in the light of a process 
of adjusting the mind, then we want to use those things round about 
the child that will help adjust him to the things that he is going to do, 
not necessarily as a business, but that best develop his mind and pre- 
pare him to get the most out of his surroundings. Life is a constant 
interchange between myself and everything that is outside of me, and 
to get the most out of life we want the best interchange between the 
individual and the things around him. 
A noted man in Chicago, Mr. John Dewey, who was going to start a 
new school, went to the furniture dealers and tried to find equipment for 
his schoolhouse which conformed to his ideas. They showed him seats 
and desks, but none of them were what he wanted. Finally, after they 
had talked it over, the dealer said, "I discover what is the matter with 
these seats; they are all listening seats!" If you think about your coun- 
try schoolhouse, you will find that the seats are all listening seats. Theo- 
retically we are away ahead of that. We know that education is a matter 
of activity; that we learn through the things that we do largely more 
than through the things that we read. We have learned, also, that edu- 
