170 MICHIGAN STATE AGRICULTURAL COLLEGE 



training in the methods of using it wisely for public purposes. 

 The importance of that education in a time like the present, in 

 which questions of vast national concern are crowding for at- 

 tention, cannot be overemphasized. We need in our colleges 

 a broader and more careful training of boys and girls in what 

 may be called the human sciences. I speak of them here as 

 human sciences. They have been for the most part treated in 

 a way inhumanly dull, impossibly forbidding. I mean the 

 science of sociology, economics, political economy — those sub- 

 jects which treat of the relationships of men and the duties and 

 responsibilities which grow out of them. In most schools these 

 subjects, which are in many ways more important to the citizens 

 of a democracy than anything else, are commonly neglected. 

 We produce excellent farmers, doctors, lawyers, chemists, engi- 

 neers, and we train each of them to make money from his calling, 

 but we fail dismally in training our boys and girls for citizenship. 

 We make little or no attempt to develop that social sympathy 

 and responsibility upon which, after all, every free government 

 must rest. 



I was greatly impressed yesterday with Dr. Bessey's address 

 on the old methods of science teaching, in which the student 

 learned of nature, not from nature, but out of books. When he 

 studied botany he studied only to know the names of plants, 

 not the plants themselves. That is exactly the stage, today, 

 which our teaching of citizenship, of social responsibility, has 

 reached. I tell you, if we would govern' ourselves wisely, we must 

 first learn to do it. We must teach it not merely out of books 

 but out of life. The great contribution of the Michigan Agri- 

 cultural College to education, it seems to me, has been the 

 inspiration it has given to the study of life direct, the widening 

 of the laboratory system of education. Now, what we need 

 today in the teaching of economics and sociology is the laboratory 

 method. I can only throw out a few suggestions here, trusting 

 that they may not, among so many educators, be lost. If I had 



