PROBLEMS IN EDUCATIONAL THEORY 81 



of knowledge from any side is carried forward toward the centre and 

 heart of things. The further he goes the more evident becomes the 

 connection between his principal subject and other subjects, some 

 of which are instrumental to the higher pursuit of his own special 

 studies and some of which carry him on to more comprehensive views. 



The guidance and prescription which predominates in earlier 

 years must be mixed with spontaneity and freedom; and the larger 

 election of later years calls for the personal direction and assistance of 

 more than formal teachers. On the whole the system proposed calls 

 for more of real teaching. If it requires fewer set lectures and class 

 lessons, and leaves the learners rather more to themselves than the 

 practice w r e are familiar with, it makes such personal help and guid- 

 ance as are given more real and vital and indispensable. It calls, 

 too, for a much wider differentiation of the processes of education in 

 our educational systems. 



The elective system, in fact, presents the double danger of scattering 

 superficiality and of intense narrowness. A little more should be 

 said concerning the second of these. Here again a safeguard is to 

 be found in the better handling of the lower grades of instruction. 

 If adequate attention is paid in those grades to the successive rise 

 of a variety of instincts and interests on the part of different pupils, 

 if against a background of prescription there is free play permitted 

 to the individual change and difference manifested in these things, the 

 pupils will have been warmed to many kinds of scholastic pursuit, 

 each undertaken at the most favorable moment for happy and lasting 

 impressions. Such procedure must go far toward preventing nar- 

 rowness in later years. 



The conception of the nature of general discipline to which we 

 are coming emphasizes this view; for if we can count on but little of 

 undistributed and universally transferable mental power, it is so much 

 the more important that in his earlier years the pupil should have 

 been introduced to many and varied special pursuits, and that each 

 of them should have been pursued at such time and in such manner 

 as might join to it the full energy of spontaneous activity. 



The vital integration of things learned with things done should 

 reenforce the several stages of this process. It should do more: 

 for, by uniting the art impulse with the interest of knowledge, it 

 should tend to liberalize the later pursuit of a vocation, as well as 

 any later pursuit of special studies. 



We may not pursue the subject further at this time. I have tried 

 to indicate, with the utmost brevity, one probable outcome of the 

 study of the small group of problems proposed, by such methods as 

 have been indicated. It all comes to this, in short, that these prob- 

 lems cannot be solved for the college or the university, nor for a school 

 of any other grade, without reference to the comprehensive view of 



