August 9, 1907] 



SCIENCE 



167 



public attention is often drawn to new 

 educational projects in a measure that is 

 truly astonishing. What is needed is that 

 that public interest should be more sus- 

 tained and more clearly manifest ; that the 

 inventor in education should have the un- 

 failing stimulus which has goaded our me- 

 chanical inventors to their most strenuous 

 endeavors. And on the part of the in- 

 ventor himself there is need of all the 

 patience and resource of the designer of 

 new mechanism; and of other qualities, 

 subtler far than these, which it may be 

 worth our while to consider at this point. 



The inventor in education does not bring 

 before the people a new object which they 

 are to look upon and admire and use. The 

 people are the very stuff of his invention, 

 public sentiment is his atmosphere, he is 

 an artificer of human society. Accord- 

 ingly he must have, many times over, the 

 patience of the mechanical inventor. He 

 must be willing to merge his fame in the 

 larger life of the invention. For if it is a 

 real and living invention he will find that 

 there are many collaborators, and it may 

 take generations to bring the design to its 

 perfection. In education it is generally" 

 true that an invention that is only of one 

 man size is not large enough to last. Yet 

 the work calls for zest and courage, and 

 there is ground for individual encourage- 

 ment. Social changes are accelerated in 

 these days. The single generation has, 

 more than ever, its chance of striking an 

 arc of appreciable advancement; and there 

 was never a time when one man in his one 

 earthly life had a better chance of doing 

 some work of noble note. I believe the 

 spirit of educational invention can be 

 quickened among the men of America, to 

 meet the larger demands that are upon us. 

 And if this language seems to spread out 

 shield and spear in the household of 

 Lyeomedes, it is not that I am seeking 

 Achilles at Vassar. It should be said 



rather that the highly educated women of 

 America are themselves to have a most im- 

 portant part in this educational quicken- 

 ing. Indeed, it is not too much to hope 

 that the time is at hand when our men and 

 women will take share and share alike in 

 this work— alike but different. And we 

 may trust and pray that the great work 

 that our women are already doing in every 

 phase of social improvement may not cause 

 the men of America to dream that their 

 responsibility can be shifted, but may 

 rather remind them that they must not 

 fail in their part. 



It may be well to enter here upon some 

 brief discussion of three or four of the 

 problems now calling for constructive lead- 

 ership. In the first place, let us make note 

 of an unfinished movement, which demands 

 our best skill and will surely reward its 

 exercise. It has been said that the educa- 

 tion of the school and education by appren- 

 ticeship, after centuries in which they have 

 gone apart, are drawing near together in 

 these days. It seems fair to expect, in fact, 

 that the school of the future will be the 

 result of their union. The combination 

 appears in many forms. Most familiar 

 of these, up to the present time, is the 

 school laboratory in the natural sciences. 

 Here instruction from the Hook assumes a 

 subordinate place and the pupil learns by 

 what he does. Already, too, the method 

 of the scientific laboratory is permeating 

 other departments of the school. It has 

 infiuenced the teaching of history and the 

 languages, and we may even see its influ- 

 ence extending to the teaching of law in 

 the professional school. But now the 

 school and the apprentice system are draw- 

 ing together in other ways. The movement 

 is obvious in manual training and domestic 

 education. The actual contact of the two 

 systems in their organized forms, however, 

 has been especially marked in the past two 



