68 EDUCATIONAL THEORY 



tion till they have been appropriated and organized at this vital 

 centre of educational doctrine, where we are immediately concerned 

 with the processes, products, and ideals of education as an art. 



In this attempt to get at the characteristic methods of educational 

 theory we find that we are dealing with processes closely related 

 to those employed in the science of politics. But it may now be 

 added that both political judgments and educational judgments 

 are very vitally related to judgments in the field of esthetics. 1 The 

 methods which we have been considering are paralleled by some 

 of those with which, for example, modern movements in literary 

 criticism have made us familiar. We find here the same endeavor 

 to correct subjective opinion by every means which may give it 

 a wider validity: by the appeal to the findings of broad experience 

 and slow-sifting time; by the appeal to history, to anthropology, to 

 psychology and sociology. In education as in literary criticism it 

 is impossible, by any amassing of exact scientific data, to dispense 

 with the large-minded discrimination of men whose cultivated taste 

 and moral sense are weighted with full knowledge of their kind and 

 of their time. 



We may make use at this point of the distinction made by De 

 Quincey between the literature of knowledge and the literature of 

 power. Placing the line of demarkation where De Quincey did not 

 place it, but where the development of natural science since his time 

 might suggest that it now be drawn, we may say that much of the 

 better literature of education, as we have it now, is literature of power 

 rather than of knowledge. Writers of genius publicists, moralists, 

 and teachers have contributed works of undoubted influence and 

 value to our body of educational doctrine. Even when a lack of 

 fully ascertained fact is apparent in such writings, and when the 

 lack of scientific system and completeness is equally noticeable, 

 they often go straight to the heart of education as a problem of con- 

 temporary life. Some of the educational writings of Matthew 

 Arnold, of M. Fouill^e, of President Eliot, of Sir Joshua Fitch, may 

 be mentioned as widely different examples of the literature here 

 referred to. In these instances we have a literature of power, 

 weighted with much of accurate knowledge. It must be the aim of 

 improved method in our educational theory to make the literature 

 of power in education increasingly a literature of knowledge and 

 power. 



Having in mind such considerations and examples as have been 

 brought forward, we may now partially describe this central, charac- 

 teristic, correlating method of educational knowledge as the method 

 of educational criticism. The term is not a happy one, and one 

 more adequate can doubtless be found. If used, it should be under- 



1 The treatment of ethics by Herbart as a division of esthetics will be recalled. 



