ratus, teachers, or needed material for this kind of work. The best kindergartners seem to have caught the child spirit and to have conformed to his needs. The primary school thrusts books and pencils too early into children's hands and substitutes attention to abstract symbols for the native interest in the pulsing, throbbing life that tantalizes them meantime by its nearness and charm. It would be foolish to discount the need of acquiring the arts of reading and writing. The time comes, and that rather early, when expression and investigation create a lively demand for these arts. But the first need is for the discipline of attention to things, for a rich stock of sense images and for such a fluency of expression and behaviour toward them as shall render the learning how to read instrumental to the larger process of enriching the life. Children are born into a material world that is organized in definite ways. For their guidance and safety they must become acquainted with its bodies and spaces, its qualities and values. They must objectify their experiences and energize in harmony with the pushes and pulls that they recognize at work in it. Dr. Harris, in his notes upon Rosenkrantz's "Philosophy of Education," says, "Freedom is the ability on the part of man to know himself and to realize himself in the world by making the matter and forces of the world his instruments and tools." So the curriculum recognizes nature study, geography, mathematics, and drawing, as investigations into the inner nature of things. But here only those observations that are in alliance with the children's interests at particular periods are suitable material. Simple studies of living things, eliciting such questions as "What is it like?", "What does it do?" are illuminating and assist in solving the child's own problems of living. Geography, if begun with an intimate acquaintance with local conditions as a basis of constructing in fancy the more remote localities studied, should spread the mental horizon and eliminate provincialism. Mathematics, approached as construction, is a revelation of the mind's own ordering power and the manner in which it objectifies the universe in space and time. It also reveals spirit as creative. But the child lives in the world of man as well as in that of nature. He must adjust his activities to those of his fellows. The humanistic studies are important in helping him find himself. Literature, language, history, music, and art help to reveal to him the essential quality of human nature. Literature, perhaps, touches conduct more intimately than any other subject, as it furnishes a child his ideals. Biography answers the same purpose. Music and art and composition, through expression, reveal himself to himself so that his own inner nature becomes intimately known. Carl von Linné School LEWIS W. COLWELL An Introduction to Experimental Pedagogy THERE ERE appeared in 1907 a German educational work which marks the beginning of a movement that is of such importance both for German education and for our own education that the teachers of this country ought to be introduced to this book and to the movement which it inaugurates. The title of the book may be translated, Lectures aiming to introduce the student to the study of experimental pedagogy. There are two volumes. The author is Professor Meumann, who has for some years been engaged in educational researches in the University of Zurich and Koenigsberg, and now at the University of Muenster. In these two volumes Professor Meumann has brought together the results of a large number of experimental investigations of educational problems, especially problems relating to the elementary school. In the introduction he calls attention to the fact that the educational problems which are of importance to classroom teachers as well as supervisors, cannot be solved unless a direct attack is made upon these questions themselves. It will not do for educators to wait for supplementary sciences such as psychology and sociology to take up educational problems. To be sure, there is a large amount of valuable information which can be drawn from these supplementary sciences, and yet this information will always be cast in the form which is appropriate to the sciences themselves rather than to strictly educational discussions. Thus, the science of psychology will treat of the general principles of habit, but it will not take up the special details of the habit of writing and treat of these in such a way as to describe the methods necessary for the best teaching of this habit in the elementary schools. In the same way, the general science of sociology will deal with the question of the best methods of treating children of foreign born parents, but the science of sociology will not describe the educational methods which must be employed in teaching the English language to such children. If these specific educational problems are to be properly solved, they must be made the subjects of investigations under conditions that are appropriate to school work and such investigations must be carried on by those who understand the special school problem that needs to be solved. By way of criticism of much of the educational psychology which has been offered to teachers, Professor Meumann calls attention to the fact that this material has related primarily to infants and not to children of school age. If mental development is to be studied in such a way as to be productive for the purpose of guiding the teacher, then mental development must be studied at the level where the schools have to deal with it. For the science which investigates by experimental methods special educational problems, Meumann has adopted the name Experimental Pedagogy. Some of the problems on which he reports results are as follows: He would deal with the bodily development of children. This is to be ascertained by careful measurements repeated at regular intervals and tabulated so as to show the growth at successive periods of the year and during successive stages of school life. The development of attention must be studied; how long can the attention of a young child be held upon a given subject and how rapidly will this period of possible concentration be increased in duration as greater and greater maturity is attained? There are numerous problems in memory; is it better to study a passage of poetry that has to be learned by heart as a whole or in parts? Is it better to repeat any passage which is to be learned a large number of times at a single sitting, or to allow a period to intervene between the successive repetitions? Again, some account must be given of the ability on the part of the children to reason and to form ideas. Can children reason upon entering school, or is that a power which develops later? The nature of fatigue must be experimentally investigated; and finally all of the specific questions that appear in the teaching of writing and reading and number must be taken up. Thus, in regard to writing we must have some account of the relative values of vertical and slant writing. We must find out whether it is better to have copy presented to the children or whether it is better to conduct the major part of writing exercises without copy actually before the eyes of the writer? In reading, the experimentalist must determine the size of kind that is most advantageous, the length of lines, and the kind of subject matter which can be most easily taught at different levels of development. In dealing with these problems, experimental methods can be very much more extensively employed than they have been in the past. Of course bodily development cannot be experimentally investigated. Here statistical methods and careful scientific measurements can alone be applied. But in the study of attention or memory or other processes of development, conditions can be prearranged or modified in such a way as to make possible the most productive experimental investigations into the nature of these processes. A special science aiming to define more clearly educational problems and to organize methods for the study of these problems is of importance to the individual teacher because it directs attention to the necessity of cultivating in the schoolroom itself the scientific attitude of investigation. Many teachers of the present day are disposed to regard their work as so distinctly practical that it is entirely dissociated from the principles published in the books on scientific education. Teachers read the formulas of psychology and the carefully worked out principles of education and regard these as somewhat remote dicta of scientific writers wholly unrelated to the practical problems of real school life. Meumann would say to such a teacher: give up, if necessary, the reading of more elaborate scientific work and set up experimental studies for yourself on some of the matters you wished solved for practical purposes in your own class. Attack some problem from the point of view of your own practical needs and get an answer, exactly as the inventor or practical physicist would attack one of his problems and get an answer through his own treatment of this problem. Not only would the establishment of such a scientific attitude toward the problems of education be of importance for the individual teacher, but it would be of the greatest importance to the supervisor who must settle some of these |