PROBLEMS IN EDUCATIONAL THEORY 69 



stood as meaning criticism in the larger and more vital sense 

 appreciative, constructive, creative criticism. However closely 

 affiliated with esthetic criticism on the one hand or with political 

 science on the other, it can draw nothing finished for its purposes 

 from these or any other sources. It must make its own way, deter- 

 mine its differentiae, establish its peculiar canons, with all patience 

 and persistence. The distinct need of the immediate future is that 

 by all possible means the literature of power in education, including 

 the literature of educational experience, be rendered more scientific. 1 



In the foregoing discussion several different methods of educa- 

 tional research have been mentioned. It should be noted that no 

 sharp distinctions are drawn between them. They are overlapping 

 and cooperating methods, and to render their cooperation effective, 

 to prevent the waste of a working at cross-purposes, is a prime 

 consideration in educational theory. Certain elements of good 

 method reappear wherever we go. The method of comparison 

 is one of these. Another, overlapping this, is the statistical method 

 so satisfying in the sense of exactness and finality which it brings, 

 and so misleading oftentimes with the appearance of explanation 

 where it has merely arranged materials preparatory to a possible 

 explanation. These are modes of procedure which cannot be dis- 

 pensed with in our educational research, and must be employed in 

 their most perfectly developed modern forms. Quite as important 

 are the objective observation and accurate description of phenomena, 

 which must always be a first consideration in any method which 

 aims at being scientific. 2 



It should now be added that no educational theory can be fully 

 scientific till it has been made to take its place in the ordered system 

 of philosophy. The principles of psychology and the related sciences, 

 the social purposes revealed in history, and the standards of excel- 

 lence in the art of teaching, are to be brought within the scrutiny 

 of philosophical method, and made to show the ultimate grounds of 

 their scheme of values and of personal influences. The tendency of 

 some students to approach educational theory as a branch of a philo- 

 sophic system, while neglecting any close examination of the facts of 

 education with which it has to do, is certainly at fault. But equally 

 faulty and inadequate is the procedure which is content with the mere 

 generalization of educational facts, and fails to see those facts and 

 generalizations in just perspective in the organic whole of human 



1 It may be found that the theory of other professional and institutional sub- 

 jects shares, along with that of education, in this character of art criticism; and 

 as the sciences and the arts become more intimately bound together, the method- 

 ology of the sciences even may be in a measure influenced from this side. 



2 Something of this sort is, I think, what Professor Hanus has in view in his 

 papers on the formulation of educational doctrine; and in a different way, what 

 Dr. J. M. Rice has in view in his recent articles in The Forum. 



