INTRODUCTORY ESSAY HENRY W. HOLMES THE professional literature of education is seldom exciting. One may read history for diversion or philosophy for edification, and some are even fascinated by treatises on medicine; but it would be hard to find anyone who has turned for sheer interest to the technical literature of pedagogy. The very word suggests dry bones. People often mispronounce it, making it more horrible with two hard g's and a short o; and the implication of distaste and distrust is so common that those who take the subject seriously become hardened to it. When one of our great universities founded a school of education, an enthusiast remarked that the professional training of teachers had at last been dressed in evening clothes; but pedagogy, as a subject, has yet to break its way into polite society. Yet people talk much about education and laymen write about it informingly, as witness the essays by laymen in this book, — while all about us the training of teachers advances and technical pedagogical literature expands. Why this divorce between the general interest in education and the work of those who are thinking, writing, and teaching "pedagogy"? Between any subject, as developed by years of specialized effort, and the common human experience and activity with which that subject deals, there is bound to be some gap. It would not speak well for education if the technical study of its problems had produced no conceptions or vocabulary forbidding to the uninitiated. It is a merit in any field of study that a part of its literature should be caviare to the general. What pedagogy has against it is not the development of a body of technical literature without interest to the untrained, but that this development has been so very recent. It has resulted mainly from the application of scientific method to the study of educational problems - the development of means of measurement (standardized tests of school achievement, intelligence tests, and other measures), the conduct of experiments, and the statistical study of school records. All this is still in its beginnings, and of course the results include some material that is empty, unimportant, or even meretricious; yet the literature of the present scientific movement in education is not merely its only really technical material but its most important and promising material as well. No student of education will be ashamed of the fact that his subject has at last come into possession of an esoteric lore of its own. There is indeed another type of writing on education which has some justification for being at least "heavy.” It is the literature on the aims of education, the curriculum, and method, in which the authors attempt to apply the conclusions of modern psychology, biology, sociology, economics, or political science to these general educational problems. Such books are very new. Their chief aim is not to secure general acceptance of educational principles nor even general discussion of such principles, but to give effect in the training of teachers to the results of modern scholarship in fields on which education must draw for guidance and direction. It would be difficult even for a master of style to make such books easy reading, whether for teachers or for laymen. To those who face in a responsible way the tremendous task of shaping the schools as an instrument of national progress and human betterment, these books are fascinating enough. But both for teachers and for laymen there is need for a literature of interpretation. Laymen well informed on modern problems and tendencies in religion, government, and industry, in all of which they are themselves immediately engaged, may know but little by direct contact about modern problems and tendencies in education. They may be greatly interested, and they may be thoroughly convinced that the schools should help to assure our progress; but their own experience with schools is in the past, and they usually find their children taken from them into a system either confusing in its newness or stiff in its conservatism, baffling frequently, in any case, to them. If they write on education out of their own conviction, they find that what they say may be heard with approval by their own kind, but often not at all by the pedagogues, who go on arguing their technical issues and slowly reshaping the programme of the schools. This present volume contains some notable essays by laymen. If their publication in collected form helps to bring home to teachers and technicians the importance and the value of lay opinion, one object of the book will be achieved. For in many fields, but perhaps especially in education, the layman has a perspective and a point of view which make him the best and most provocative critic of the expert. Teachers, school officers, and professors of education cannot too often remind themselves that schools exist to influence the collective life of the community - the life that laymen live. Schoolmen must not get ensnared in their own machinery, nor claim an exclusive understanding and control of it. Education is everybody's business; and if some are responsible and must therefore exercise final authority, they will nevertheless do well to listen to the best-informed expression of the public mind. Laymen, on the other hand, need a guide to the technical issues in which the pedagogues are immersed, and the workers in the ranks of the teachers often need it as much. This volume cannot pretend fully to supply such a guide, for it must follow in the main the lines laid down for it by the exigencies of selection from the essays on education published during recent years in the Atlantic Monthly; but in the forewords, the problems, the reference lists, and in this introductory essay, the editors have tried to present material out of which some knowledge may be gained of the present world of pedagogical thought. Some of the essays, also, are by professional educators, writing for Atlantic readers. Such are the essays by Dr. Snedden and Dr. Spaulding. If the experts find some satisfaction in the two types of professional writing distinguished above, the reports of experimental and statistical study and the application of modern scholarship to educational problems, — they must admit that neither type has yet begun to shape public opinion on education. And a gap between public opinion and school practice being undesirable and in the end impossible, it will soon be time for the experts to become propagandists, just as it has now become necessary for scholars in theology and Biblical exegesis to leave their preoccupation with scholarship and fight for their conclusions in the open arena of public discussion. The reason for the lack of public interest in professional books on education was at one time very simple - the books were stupid and empty. When books on education were in the main unscholarly sketches of great educators, shallow outlines of the history of education, "practical" books on method, special volumes on the teaching of particular subjects, or treatises on the "philosophy" of education, usually out of relation to the developments of philosophic thought in general or the trend of modern dis |