696 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 
investigation into the questions that are most urgently demanding answers at this 
time among the practical educators of the country. To discover and classify 
these, and then to correlate them with the various investigations that are being 
made throughout the world, would be to render a very practical service to the 
study of Education. The truths thus acquired and recorded could be fitted into 
the mass already at our disposal, and the result would be a great strengthening 
of that objective standard that is so essential to the independent progress of our 
study. 
Education ranks with a group of studies that deal with humanity in its various 
aspects. Psychology naturally is the science that underlies them all, since it 
is the abstract study of human nature which is their raw material. But Politics, 
Economics, Sociology, Eugenics, all claim to be sciences, and if we probe into 
their standards we find that they are largely statistical. It is quite possible by 
careful investigation among the subject-matter of these sciences to organise a 
system of general principles based upon averages obtained from a very wide 
field of investigation. These principles are of very general application, though 
they may not enable us to prophesy in individual cases. This. indeed, is at the 
root of a great deal of the criticism levelled at the claims of Education to rank 
as a science. A parent or an education authority presents a boy to an educator 
and calls for a prophecy. The educator must decline, since he cannot honestly 
prophesy in an individual case, though he may be prepared to venture on a 
reasoned statement of what is likely to occur in the boy’s educational career. 
The educator is, in fact, in precisely the same position as a medical man called 
in to a case. He can prophesy, but only in general terms. In both cases it is 
the application of general principles to a particular case. 
This raises the whole question of the value of the average in matters of 
Education. Psychologists in addressing teachers are beginning to warn them 
that the average is only an abstraction, and really does not exist. We are told 
that what the teacher has to concern himself with is ‘the living child here and 
now before him,’ and he is accordingly warned against the insubstantiality of the 
elusive abstract. But this is to confound two distinct things. It is true that the 
teacher must always deal with a living pupil here and now before him. But in 
his dealing with that living pupil he has to apply a paid-up capital of knowledge 
of men and of boys in general. He must seek to understand the living boy by the 
aid of knowledge previously acquired, and this knowledge is represented by the 
average. The master may be unable to prophesy with certainty how Jones minor 
will act under certain specified conditions. But from a knowledge of Third Form 
boys in general he can make a guess that is very likely to hit the mark. The 
teacher who applies his knowledge of the average Third Form boy to the minor 
Jones, without medification to suit Jones’s case, acts unintelligently, but the 
possibility of blunders by a dull master does not reduce the value of the know- 
ledge of the average in the hands of one who is capable. The concept of the 
average boy as it is developed by experience and study in the mind of the master 
forms a standard by which other bovs may be estimated. This standard is partly 
subjective, partly objective. In so far as the standard is acquired by the personal 
experience of the master it is subjective. The unreasoned but very effective 
knowledge of boy nature that enables an efficient master who is cuiltless of any 
acquaintance with educational theory to know how a boy is likely to act under 
given circumstances results from the training of experience, and is peculiar to 
its possessor, On the other hand, the knowledge of boy nature that has been 
acquired by deliberate study and by experiment is something that has an 
existence independent of the individual. It is obiective, or at any rate has an 
objective bias. 
We must distinguish in practice between the average and the type. The 
average boy may have no existence in reality, he may be a pure abstraction; 
but the tyne is concrete, and may be regarded as the embodiment of all the 
essentials that go to make up the average, with the addition of certain qualities 
that must be present in some form or other, though the particular form is im- 
material. The average is to the type as the concept is to the generalised image. 
The tvpe may form a very useful standard for masters whose tendency is strongly 
towards the concrete, but the average has a special and a different value, and in 
capable hands is more effectively applied because it is of a wider range, To con: 
