January 24, 1913] 



SCIENCE 



141 



TABLE II 



relation of First Term 's Marie to Length of 

 Stay in Bigh School 



Such prophecies as these for New York 

 City could easily be worked out for any 

 community. They show that in the im- 

 portant matter of length of stay in school 

 a pupil's career is far from being a matter 

 of unpredictable fortuity. Useful diag- 

 nosis of him and prognosis concerning his 

 high school career can begin before he sets 

 foot in the school, and for that matter, as 

 other facts could be adduced to show, be- 

 fore he is born. 



These two specimens of recent work in 

 educational diagnosis give a just notion of 

 what may be expected from the scientific 

 study of human capacities, interests and 

 cai-eers. The worker who will make re- 

 peated tests of the general intellectual de- 

 velopment or the special school achieve- 

 ment of any hundred human beings for any 

 five years of their lives, utilizing the logic 

 and technique appropriate to mental and 

 social measurements, may be sure of con- 

 tributing to the advancement of educa- 

 tional science. 



The work of observing and measuring the 

 relations between traits of man's constitu- 

 tion, circumstances of his environment and 

 events in his career, both as these happen 

 in nature and as they are modified by in- 

 genious experiment, is sure to increase our 

 knowledge of his nature and our power 

 over his fate. It will not be long before the 

 members of this section will remember with 

 amusement the time when education waited 

 for the expensive test of actual trial to tell 

 how well a boy or girl would succeed with 

 a given trade, with the work of college and 

 professional school, or with the general 

 task of leading a decent, law-abiding, hu- 

 mane life. 



This work of testing tests — of measuring 

 the relations of this and that feature of a 

 man's educational life-history — has been 

 neglected by many of the ablest students of 

 human nature and education, partly, I 

 think, because it seems to lack the inspira- 

 tion of sweeping theories and the drama of 

 immediate consequences. From the ordi- 

 nary point of view it is a little trivial and 

 tedious. But in the sense that the law of 

 gravitation has a grandeur far beyond that 

 of the heavens — in the sense that a change 

 in the death-rate is the most truly dramatic 

 event in nature — in this sense the task of 

 testing tests gives way to no scientific work 

 in dignity and humaneness. Tables of cor- 



