CAUSE AND EFFECT IN EDUCATION. 57 



heredity seems good or bad. Even in this very moderate func- 

 tion he blunders, for the most part, terribly. 



The second element is the one with which we have practically 

 to deal. It includes all post-natal influences. In science we call 

 it environment. 



It is a long-standing debate as to which of these elements is 

 the stronger. We need not enter the controversy. The balance 

 of present evidence seems to support that view of the matter 

 which gives the greater influence to environment. In this lies 

 the hope of the educator. We mean to get the best of the dead 

 great-grandmother. Mr. Fiske has pointed out that in the in- 

 creased helplessness of the human infant, in its greater freedom 

 from inborn instincts, in the lengthening days of the plastic 

 period of infancy are to be found the possibilities of a far greater 

 individual advance. 



This, then, is the problem set before us as educators so to 

 shape these influences that the developing human spirit may ap- 

 proach perfection. It is not a new problem. It was before the 

 Greeks. It was before the men of the middle ages. It has been 

 constantly before our own people. But it has never been very 

 satisfactorily solved. 



The extent of our failure can be better realized when we re- 

 member that nearly all educational reforms have been forced 

 upon the schools from without. They originated with men and 

 women who were so fortunate as to escape the pedagogical 

 blight. When we remember further that the men of mark in the 

 great world of action and creative thought have either been edu- 

 cated in an irregular fashion, or, if they have gone to the acade- 

 mies and colleges, have never taken the courses too seriously, 

 these facts are significant. They mean that education has too 

 often been a thwarting of the spirit, an attempt to fit a square 

 plug into a round hole, a pressure, a dead weight, rather than an 

 unfolding. They mean, in short, that education has seldom, in 

 practice at least, been reduced to a science. 



We fail as Ptolemy failed, as Kepler failed, as the alchemists 

 failed. We fail because we do not observe the true sequence of 

 cause and effect in the life of the child. We shall succeed when 

 we abandon our educational nostrums, our tonics, our pills, our 

 philosopher's stones for turning ignorance into knowledge, our 

 short-cut methods of salvation for making bad into good. We 

 shall transform education into a science and educators into scien- 

 tists when we give up these off-hand remedies, these false views 

 of causal relationships, and come to recognize the simple fact that 

 the child is an organism, and that the processes of growth and 

 education must conform to the laws of organisms. We must part 

 company with that fatal duality which separates body and spirit. 



TOL. XLV. 5 



