Γι

admitted. They notice that boys who graduate from high schools seldom intend to become teachers either by the normal school or the university route. They represent the notion that some masculinity is a good thing to have in the teaching corps of our country. They stand for such policies as will attract into the teaching profession as many robust young men as possible. Viewing education as a whole it is discovered that the supply of masculinity in the teaching corps is chiefly thru the ambitious, progressive, self-determining normal schools that stand firmly and always for the admission to the normal school of all persons of honest intentions who give undoubted promise of developing into good teachers. These normal schools represent the wholesome doctrine that for a long time to come teachers' certificates in our country should be secured by virtue of reasonable culture, common-sense, and wholesome personality, regardless of degrees and graduating systems. This doctrine or policy will for some decades at least be practiced in many states and will prove to be the chief means of supplying a reasonable proportion of male teachers for our public schools.

The college courses in normal schools of the type here mentioned have the same effect upon students in the ordinary courses of the normal school that graduate courses in the university have upon the undergraduates of the university. Where such normal schools are in operation the people know what is being done and believe in it. They want it just that way. The people and the legislatures give ample support financially both to the universities and to the ambitious normal schools. Those normal schools, too, that make the most marked growth and the best impress upon education are the ones that are most ambitious and aggressive.

During the past fifteen years the university of a certain state has quadrupled its facilities and almost doubled the difficulties as to entrance and graduation; but the normal schools of this same state have remained almost stationary during the same period. They still offer short courses which are chiefly pedagogical. They content themselves with "preparing teachers for elementary schools." They are overshadowed by the university and controlled by politicians. They are not known to have made any effective contribution to elementary education. They have learned the popular schoolroom practices and have passed the processes along for use in public schools. They will never materially modify education in their state till they change their policy. From the nature of the case an institution that has limits easily reached and no freedom to rise higher by self-effort and no outlook of its own into higher student life of its own, cannot make effective contributions to those forms of education which it professes to supply with teachers. An institution that is dead at the top can't be much of a stimulus to life in any other institution.

One fatal obstacle in the pathway of those normal schools that offer exclusively or chiefly pedagogical courses is this: Pedagogy itself is not yet in pedagogical form as a subject to be assigned, illustrated, and taught. It doesn't contribute sufficiently to mental virility. It doesn't compare with the organized

courses in mathematics, Latin, history, and other subjects. Hence the efficient normal school applies about two-thirds of its student energy to the strictly academic subjects and about one-third of its student energy to professional subjects. In our discussions it is noticed that those who would restrict American normal schools to the exclusively pedagogical courses never mention the procedure of normal schools in foreign countries. There is good reason for their silence on this phase of the issue.

The interpretation of the more common creed of the universities is that a half-educated person is good enough to teach children up to and including the last day in the eighth grade, but a fully educated person is necessary to teach children from and after the first day in the high school. This creed is practically identical with the notion in some rural districts that a cheap teacher will do for small children and that a good teacher is necessary for large children. But the fact is that if we should tolerate anywhere in education a teacher who has taken a short cut to his own education and who has restricted resources, it is in the departmental work of a high school where a settled scheme or plan must be followed and things even in narrow channels are pretty sure to be effectively done. But think of an ignorant, narrow, and poorly equipped man or woman pretending to teach in the fifth, sixth, seventh, or eigh h grade. Think of the varied and immeasurable responsibilities. Who else in the wide world has need of greater resources? Where should scholarship be more thoro or accurate? Is it not clear beyond reasonable doubt that if any man or woman acting in the capacity of a teacher should have a college education it is the teacher in the elementary school?

We advance backward when we concentrate our best energies and our best culture in the higher parts of the curriculum and leave the lower parts of it to be exploited by poorly educated people who may have been filled with all the prescriptions, devices, and so-called methods of a short-course normal school.

And again, who that has studied education can give a single reason why the salary of an elementary teacher should be lower than the salary of a highschool teacher?

I believe we shall all some day agree that if a college atmosphere is necessary to make a good teacher for any school it is necessary to make a good teacher for every school. I believe, too, that the true college atmosphere so much talked of by university men, is now found in several ambitious normal schools of the Middle West. Should not such atmosphere pervade them all?

The only tenable doctrine seems to be that all normal schools should, as soon as conditions will permit, raise their standards until the academic content of normal-school education will include the culture represented in a college education. Then we should have normal-school graduates (and those university graduates who attempt to teach) distributed from high school to kindergarten according to their natural and acquired traits, their adaptability, and their special preparation, some teaching in rural schools, some in kindergartens,

some in elementary graded schools of villages, some in high schools, and some filling principalships and superintendencies.

The speaker recently had his attention called to the distribution of the graduating classes in the school which he serves. Some of the graduates will enter rural schools; some, graded village schools; some, approved high schools; some will fill superintendencies in different states.

The speaker supports enthusiastically the university of his own state. He went farther than any other man in his state to urge the creation of a teachers' college in the university of his state. He urged the establishment in that teachers' college of a complete practice school from first grade to high-school seniors inclusive. That good teachers' college is now in operation. It is a stimulus to the co-operating state normal schools. It compels the normal schools to have a progressive, constructive policy so that they cannot cater very much to current demands and fashions or feel satisfied when they have copied, commended, and disseminated the practices and ideals of educational theorists past and present. Side by side with this new competition, the normal schools seek to create better ideals, to set up higher standards, to conduct more sensible experiments, and to exemplify constructively the best attainable practices in school education.

Among other Missouri experiments is a model rural schoolhouse on the normal-school campus. This schoolhouse demonstrates that a rural district can for about $1,400 have a schoolhouse offering all the comforts and conveniences to be had in any city school district excepting electric light. During the ensuing year this schoolhouse will contain a model rural school with its free textbooks, transportation of rural children, and all the other facilities that can be thought out and secured.

In brief, then, the issues or some of them are: Shall normal schools advance or stand still? Shall they be free severally to determine for themselves what they ought to do or shall they be limited in view of the designs, ambitions, and interests of other institutions? Shall they be conservative and follow the trail marked out by others, or shall they be rationally aggressive and assume leadership to the extent of their capabilities and opportunities? Shall they seek affiliation and approval by other institutions standing between themselves and the people, or shall they affiliate themselves directly with their constituents, the people at large whom they are created to serve?

There are things to be done that the people want done, things that ought to be done in the schools of our country, things that only normal schools can do. So anxious and responsive are the people in some states that they are easily led to institute and support a variety of superficial but inadequate and spurious substitutes for normal schools while the men alleged to be managing the normal schools are engaged in somnolent restfulness.

Surely none will say that normal schools should all be of one type. It is doubtful whether any two should be just alike. Surely the best ones differ from one another in many particulars. The greatest issue seems to be whether

normal schools shall remain contentedly in static condition while all the world moves, or assume an attitude of eager and inquisitive expectancy, constantly anticipating a wider horizon, greater difficulties, more responsibilities, and higher efficiency. Each normal school can have whatever it ought to have if only those in charge of it will stand up and honestly contest every inch of the ground with whatever may stand in the way. Finally, the normal schools should welcome wise counsel but always and everywhere demand freedom to do and to be whatever from their own point of view is clearly seen to be for the common good in education.

THE PEDAGOGICAL LABORATORY IN THE SCIENTIFIC STUDY OF EDUCATION

WILLIAM ARTHUR CLARK, PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION, STATE NORMAL SCHOOL, KEARNEY, NEBRASKA

The laboratory is the workshop of modern science. It is an essential factor in all scientific investigation and instruction. It is in the laboratory that science is born and nurtured. It is here that the patient investigator explores new fields or resurveys old ones; here that he critically examines phenomena and constructs schemes of thought. It is also in the laboratory that instruction is rendered concrete thru the participation of the immature student, under suggestive guidance, in the work of the original investigator. He is led to corroborate for himself the generalizations of the textbook by reproducing in abridged form the work of the explorer. The laboratory has thus two distinct functions, discovery and exemplification; or there are two distinct forms of laboratories, research laboratories and teaching laboratories, the former being designed solely for the discovery of new truth and the latter being employed in the exemplification of known truths in the process of instruction.

A pedagogical laboratory is a laboratory for the scientific study of pedagogy. It is a school for experimental teaching and is related to pedagogy as the chemical laboratory is to chemistry. It may have the two forms common to all laboratories: the research laboratory for the discovery of educational facts and principles, and the teaching laboratory for the illustration of educational laws in their practical application in the art of teaching. While the second form of the laboratory is common in the "model schools" of state normal schools, the first form is almost unknown in the field of pedagogy. It is the object of this paper to call attention to the importance of the research laboratory in the scientific study of education-to show what it is in purpose, in organization, and in experimental processes.

Before entering upon a discussion of the specific character of the pedagogical laboratory and its possibilities in the study of pedagogy, it is necessary to show that pedagogy is a science, capable of experimental study under laboratory conditions. This is the more important since prominent educational theorists have denied that there is a science of education, either in esse or in posse.

This denial to pedagogy of a place among the sciences is due chiefly to three facts, one or all of which may be present in any given case: first, a vagueness of conception regarding what constitutes a science; second, a lack of precise definition of education; and third, ignorance of what has already been accomplished in the formulation of fundamental educational principles. It will help to clear the way for a definite statement of the place of the laboratory in the study of education, if we examine briefly each of these points.

A science is an organically related body of thought originating in a specialization of interests. The separate sciences are developed in a critical examination of segregated groups of phenomena; and any distinct form of experiencing, or of life activity, may give rise to a science. The fundamental question as to the possibility of a science is, Is there a related body of phenomena of sufficient worth and interest to invite the student to constructive critical study? Sciences are styles of thought, fashions in experiencing, that are born, run their courses, and die, giving place to new sciences. Any mode or "way of looking at things" may become a science, if the facts are so differentiated and organized as to constitute a distinct phase of experience. While. analysis and explanation are characteristic of all modern science, those fields in which the normative phase is predominant are no less the subject-matter of true sciences than those in which the descriptive phase is alone considered; thus agriculture is as truly a science as botany, or ethics as psychology. Also instead of the art aspect of any field of thought precluding a science aspect of the same field, it rather demands it as a complementary form of experience. The conclusion of Professor Royce in his well-known article in the first two numbers of the Educational Review that "Since teaching is an art, there is no science of education," would have been more just, even on the basis of his own scholarly discussion, if he had said, Since teaching is an art, there is a science of education, at least in posse. There is, or may be, a cognate science for e ery constructive art.

But granting all of these too briefly stated generalizations, what can we say of the claim of pedagogy to rank as a science? Pedagogy is the science of education. It is easy to justify this definition, if we properly define education. This term is so loosely used, even in textbooks on the subject, that its meaning must be clearly stated before it is possible to show that the matter designated can be made the proper subject of laboratory study. Education, as the subject-matter of the science of pedagogy, is the conscious direction which the more mature person gives to the life of the less mature. The fundamental idea in this definition is conscious guidance by one person of the life processes of another. There are three important implications in this statement: first, it restricts the term education to what is commonly called "formal education," that is, to purposed constructive control over the development of another; second, it regards education as a process rather than a product, the process of determining another's life toward a more or less clearly discerned goal, rather than the result of such directed growth; third, it implies that in any