92 NATURE STUDY REVIEW [8 -.a— Mar., 1913 



tive character and fail in its rightful influence because of their 

 failure to adjust themselves to it; rather are they disposed to 

 refract and bend it to correspond to their traditional practices. 



It must have been observed that I have not attempted to 

 justify the existence of any subject on the ground of its mind 

 training value. And yet, this is the very thing the schoolmaster 

 usually resorts to when he defends or argues for the retention 

 of the new subject after it has been forced upon him. The 

 explosion of the doctrine of formal discipline has removed from 

 many a schoolmaster his pedagogical safeguard; it will no long- 

 er serve as a kind of final cause for determining the educational 

 value of subject matter. 



It was contended by our educational forbears that training 

 in accuracy in one field meant an equal amount of training in 

 accuracy in every field, that training in observation in one field 

 meant an equal amount of training in observation in every field ; 

 in other words the reasoning ability one had trained through the 

 study of mathematics made him therefore a correspondingly 

 better reasoner in theology, and the training in memory one got 

 by the study of language made him therefore a correspondingly 

 better memorizer of dates in history. Under this theory special- 

 ized skills were generalized so as to have universal application. 



No one who is thoroughly informed in regard to the recent 

 investigations in educational psychology will assert that subjects 

 are intended to train particular faculties, that the training one 

 receives in accuracy in observation, or in memory in one field 

 necessarily means an equal amount in another field. Indeed, 

 we know that training in one field means no training at all in 

 dissimilar fields. This does not mean that the mind is not to be 

 trained. The mind is to be trained, but in those habits, modes of 

 behavior, methods of work, appreciations, and it is to secure 

 possession of that knowledge that will be of the greatest social 

 service to it. A few studies or a few situations will not accom- 

 plish this result ; a variety of studies and situations — hence the 

 enrichment of the curriculum — are needed. Formal discipline 

 and social utility are thus seen to be but separate ends of the 

 same problem. 



All this means that a new and heavier responsibility is 

 placed upon the teachers of the present generation than upon the 

 teachers of the past generation. It is their business to give train- 

 ing in those subjects that are of the greatest environmental im- 

 portance. This old question. "What knowledge is of the most 

 worth" has now been answered. "These subjects are of the 



