BY FRANCIS A. WALKER, PH.D., LL.D. Late President Massachusetts Institute of Technology EDITED BY JAMES PHINNEY MUNROE NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1899 EDITOR'S PREFACE. THE collection into a volume of the following addresses and papers relating to education is in accordance with the expressed intention of the late President Walker. That the work should be done by an editor instead of by the author is but another of the countless losses suffered through his untimely death. Although, while at Yale University, he had rendered admirable service to the schools both of the State of Connecticut and of the city of New Haven, the fact that no paper dealing with the subject appeared earlier than 1884, when General Walker was in middle life, indicates that questions of education had not engaged his attention, to the point of a formal discussion of them, until after he assumed the Presidency of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1881. Indeed, so much deeper had been his study of other social questions, that, while exhibiting the deepest interest in matters relating to education, he disclaimed any special or technical knowledge concerning them. That, however, he was an educator in the highest and best sense of this much-abused term is amply shown by his brilliant and altogether satisfactory administration, during the last fifteen years of his life, of the Institute of Technology, and by his admirable treatment of the special topics in education with which this volume deals. Bred in one of what he himself calls the "old-fash ioned" college courses, a teacher, in youth, of Latin and Greek, he found himself, nevertheless, in full sympathy with that newer scheme of higher education in which the pure and applied sciences take an equal position, as agents of culture, with that accorded for so many centuries to the Classics alone. An ardent, effective, and yet restrained champion of this more modern university training, he was, no less, an advocate of needed reforms in elementary and secondary teaching, doing notable work, to use Dr. Harris's apt phrase, in the "pathology of education." The papers, arranged in such sequence as was possible, fall into four main groups: Technological Education; Manual Education; the Teaching of Arithmetic; and various College Problems. The Valedictory which, fortunately preserved, closes the volume carries its own reason for insertion. With such omissions as are indicated and with such minor alterations as, it is believed, the author would himself have made, the papers appear as originally printed or delivered. Parts of other addresses which, because of repetition, could not be presented in full have been inserted as footnotes. It is hoped that, by this means, nothing of permanent value relating to education uttered and preserved by President Walker has failed of inclusion. The thanks of the editor are due to the several publishers and officers of associations for their courteous permission to reprint many of the papers. BOSTON, September, 1898. |