June 8, 1906.] 



SCIENCE. 



883 



enough to buy the independence of any man 

 who is really worth purchasing." 



The more closely the business analogy is 

 examined the more apparent is its failure to 

 fit the conditions of education. Efficiency in 

 business is achieved by the subordination of 

 individual initiative to centralized direction. 

 A highly capable manager makes all the plans, 

 and transmits his ideas, through his heads of 

 departments, to the host of workers, who are 

 expected to do exactly as they are told. Now 

 this arrangement, entirely proper in a depart- 

 ment store or a railway company, becomes 

 almost worthless when fitted to a university 

 or a system of public schools, for here the one 

 essential factor of success is that the teachers, 

 who are in this case the host of workers, 

 should be left unhampered by specific direc- 

 tions, and free to apply their own specialized 

 intelligence to their work. Every attempt to 

 shape that work from above, except in such 

 mechanical or formal matters as the allotment 

 of duties and the arrangement of programs, 

 especially every attempt to impose tests or 

 dictate concerning methods, is likely to work 

 direct injury, and is certain in time to elim- 

 inate from the body of workers the very per- 

 sons whom it is most desirable to retain. For 

 it can not be said too often or too emphatically 

 that teaching is the personal concern of in- 

 structor and student, and that any meddling 

 with this delicate and intimate relation will 

 work much more mischief than good. So the 

 commercial ideal of high-priced imperious 

 management and low-priced docile labor can 

 have no place in educational work, where the 

 ideal should be rather that of cordial coopera- 

 tion between all the forces engaged, with the 

 distinct admission that educational policy (as 

 far as such a thing is found desirable) must 

 proceed from the established teaching relation 

 rather than from the doctrinaire mandate of 

 the executive theorist. 



We know very well the clamorous objections 

 that will be raised against the fundamental 

 propositions above outlined. ' Chaos is come 

 again ' will be the outcry whenever education 

 is sought to be rearranged upon these condi- 

 tions. To such rigidity of mind have the 

 majority of educational leaders been reduced 



by the ideal of regimentation and the fetich- 

 worship of system and uniformity that they 

 are honestly incapable of realizing the indi- 

 vidualist attitude or of sympathizing with the 

 more humane and rational principles which 

 we have endeavored to set forth. Jealous 

 enough of professional privilege on their own 

 account, they take a slighting view of the 

 equally valid claims to professional considera- 

 tion made by the body of actual teachers. 

 They are so impressed by their smoothly- 

 working machinery as to forget completely 

 that the fashioning of souls is a very different 

 affair from the manufacture of watches or 

 other products of the mechanic arts. To their 

 view, the alternative offered in place of their 

 elaborate systems of executive control and the 

 graded devolution of authority may well seem 

 to deserve the name of chaos, but intelligent 

 minds will not be terrified by a word which 

 means, in this instance and in the last an- 

 alysis, nothing more than a recognition of the 

 fact that teachers and students are alike in- 

 dividuals, and that prescription ew masse is 

 the poorest possible way of dealing with diffi- 

 culties that concern individuals alone. 



Aside from the cry of chaos, every plea for 

 the rehabilitation of the teaching profession 

 is sure to be met by the assertion that large 

 numbers of those engaged in it are unfit for 

 the burden of professional responsibility. 

 This is probably true. It would be surprising 

 if it were not true, when we consider the 

 meagerness of the rewards hitherto held out 

 to the rank and file of the profession, and the 

 constant growth of the regulative tendency 

 which unfailingly operates to deter the best 

 men from becoming teachers, and to drive 

 from the ranks the best of those already en- 

 listed. The situation, moreover, as respects 

 the sort of ability, the type of outstanding 

 personality, most to be desired, tends con- 

 stantly to grow worse rather than better 

 through the continuous operation of the same 

 malign influences. But was there ever a more 

 vicious circle of argument than that which 

 defends the persistence in a system productive 

 of such unfortunate results by urging that 

 the personnel of the profession has now been 

 brought so low that the restoration of its in- 



