February, ’20] 
O’KANE: PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS 
55 
our task poorly and incompletely if we thought only of facts and laws 
and their utilization in efficient mental process. A college has failed 
unless it has given to its young men and women a wider vision of life 
itself, has pushed back the horizon, has served to give new meaning 
and value to the things which make up life. “The purpose of educa¬ 
tion,” said Spencer, “is to prepare for complete living.” 
The method, the technique, by which the instructor may best seek 
to further these purposes has never been well studied and defined in 
the realm of college teaching. There is no comprehensive fund of 
recorded experience on which we may draw. In meetings of college 
faculties our time seems rather to be occupied with discussion of pro¬ 
posed new courses, re-arrangement of those that exist and discourse 
concerning student absences, grades and petitions. There appears to 
be a sort of general theory that a college student is mature and fixed 
in his mental processes. It seems to be sufficient if the instructor 
enunciate a multitude of facts. And, in truth, probably the instructor 
is doing as he was done by. 
But the psychology of learning does not cease with the grammar 
grades. Indeed, in the great fundamentals, there is probably little 
difference between the learning processes of the high school student 
and those of the college student. In the secondary schools the question 
of teaching methods has received much study. There is no reason 
to confine to the high school many of the principles now recognized 
and accepted. Read again that lucid volume by William James entitled 
“Talks to Teachers,” and consider if the suggestions there made do not 
apply to all teaching. 
In our college classes, as in the* grades, we shall do well if we take 
pains to lead our students from the familiar to the unfamiliar and not 
plump them into the wholly new without anchor or compass. The 
store of experience and knowledge that a student already possesses is 
his only possible basis for understanding and interpreting new facts. 
The bridge from the unknown to the known cannot span great gulfs 
at a single leap, but must arch from pier to pier. The new thing that 
has a discernible relation to something already familiar is armed at 
the outset with interest. 
Again it will best avail our purposes if we constantly let the simple 
precede the complex, the concrete precede the abstract. To proceed 
from principle to example, even though the principle may be expressed 
in few words and the example require many, is to run contrary to the 
normal process of the human brain. A law is simple to us as teachers 
because we have had experience with many illustrations of it, but to 
the student who lacks this apperceptive data the law is complex. 
We need not be ashamed of constant and constructive effort to 
