EDUCATION : A SURVEY OF RECENT EDUCATIONAL THEORY. 169 



strain Dr. Brewer says that the teacher of a lesson in arithmetic, 

 geography, language or science, should bear in mind that each 

 child's life presents certain actual and potential requirements of 

 a personal, social, occupational and civic sort, and should see 

 that the study and experience involved in each lesson are so 

 planned as to contribute something towards satisfying these 

 needs.* 



Whether the question of democracy be or be not involved, it 

 cannot be doubted that for many subjects need is the best 

 instructor. It is also clear that for several — or, indeed, many 

 of these — it is not in ordinary cases possible to reproduce the 

 need. A man who had to find his own way from London to 

 Newcastle without the aid of railway or mail-coach would learn 

 the geography of this island better than he could learn it out of 

 books. Yet this experimental method can only be applied to 

 geography on so small a scale as to be insignificant. To many 

 subjects of undoubted importance it cannot be applied at all ; 

 and even a little speculation brings us back to some very important 

 principles, e.g., that society depends on the division of labour, 

 and that a little knowledge is apt to be not only useless but 

 dangerous. A dramatist recently showed how on a desert island 

 the positions of a lord and his valet were reversed : the valet 

 took command. But men do not ordinarily live on desert 

 islands : their lives are passed on thickly populated areas, 

 whatever their form of government ; and the conditions which 

 have resulted from these aggregations of human beings show an 

 extraordinary likeness for all recorded periods. Preparation^ 

 then, has to be made for such situations rather than for those 

 whose occurrence is exceptional and improbable. Further, it 

 is not clear that democracy can dispense with the habit of un- 

 questioning obedience where there are good reasons for the 

 order, but those reasons cannot be communicated ; and it 

 would appear that education has at all times endeavoured to 

 make the student use his brains in some regions and abstain from 

 using them in others. 



Much the same idea is to be found in the latest work which 

 I have been able to use, of which the title, Education for Liberty^ 

 implies that its author's ideal resembles that of the Americans, 

 and that in his opinion diflerent types of education are suited 



* Annals of the American Academy, p. 56. 



