IF
ALL the murdered golden-egg-laying geese were laid wing to wing they would, very likely, reach from somewhere to somewhere else . Their assembled carcasses might suggest how little we realize what is good for us and how prone we are to belittle some of the principles and practices vital to our existence and progress. What would we do without "education," upon which according to the commonest platitudes, any democratic society depends? Yet in sophisticated circles the surest way of getting the "brush-off" is to be identified with It must be because the some form of "education." school teacher stands near the bottom of the social and economic scale-as indeed seems evident from their appallingly low average salaries. Perhaps if a John L. Pedagog should appear who could direct these sporadic teachers strikes and put the teacher more or less in the money we might suddenly find the profession attractive, respectable, and respected. Love may make the world go round, but it is education that makes it go straight. For it is education's objective to make our lives effective, personally and socially. The sum total of this effectiveness is industrial, economic, and social progress. All the paraphernalia and "technology" of the process of education is the means of arriving at this objective and includes not only the apparatus and experiences of the schoolroom during the youthful years but also a large portion of our life's activity up to its end. Newspapers, radios, public discussions-if they aren't educative are mere amusements. Those who engage in this work are performing the world's most important service, no matter what they are paid. Nevertheless, we seem to think of those who are concerned with the early, youthful part of the process as mere diaper-changers, forgetting that someone has to do this and that it is essential to the later, more spectacular tasks. Why should we belittle the efforts of the "educationists" to put this process on a more objective basis? We of the scientific fraternity in one breath demand the application of the "scientific method" to more of the world's problems and in the next breath we scoff at the efforts of those who make the attempt. We insist that you can't make a science out of a field of knowledge until you can measure its variables quantitatively, and then we laugh at what are called "educational measurements"-and indeed the whole field of "educational re-
search"-calling them the brain-waves of untrained amateurs. But, Mr. Precision Chemist, can you point out any better way of organizing this field and making the necessary observations and measurements. The most you have ever done is to say: "Shucks, any fool knows you can't measure intelligence; common sense tells you ... ,''. etc. But don 't forget it isn't long since the Natural Philosophers were saying the same sort of thing about your field. The "educationists," even if th ey don 't always speak our language, are after all serious fellows who are making an honest effort to bring some objectivity into a field in which there are a great many subjective factors. That their results are generally expressed in statistical mathematics rather than differential equations should not make the physical chemist critical; he often uses the same methods in some of his own work. Among the commonest complaints against the "educationists" is their suppo sed belief that one need not know the subject matt er in order to teach it-that it is unnecessary to know any chemistry as long as one knows the tricks of pedagogy. But did you ever really hear a qualified pers on say so? You would certainly never hear it in any school of education. Of course, one must recognize that practical situations sometimes require regrettable expedients. In a three-teacher high school in the mountains where twelve subjects are taught, it will scarcely be possible for each teacher to be a qualified specialist in each subject he teaches. But how many times have you been assigned a job for which you realized yourself totally :unprepared? You probably would have felt your intelligence insulted if your employer had brought in an outside expert. Furthermore, we must remember that in the early years the primary responsibility of the teacher is to his student rather than to his subject. He may feel that he is teaching students rather than chemistry. This becomes less so as one goes through the college years, until in the graduate school it is perhaps defensible that a professor becomes so engrossed in his subject that his students are more or less incidental. At this level the student should be able to get what he needs from the professor, whether he is taught or not. Perhaps if we tried better to understand educational problems and did not depend upon what may be mere group tradition, we would be more tolerant and appreciative of what is being done.
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