his outlook must be directed toward the future, not the past. Nothing could well be more fatal to the cause of woman's education than to suppose that the question is already settled. The commencement has indeed been made, but only the commencement. Mere multiplication of institutions and influences of the existing type, however valuable, as affording opportunities to individual young women, will do little toward determining the larger aspects of the case. Were the number of purely women's colleges largely increased, and were all the important boys' colleges to open their doors to girls, only the necessary basis for the solution of the problem would be obtained.
Such inquiries as we have briefly summarized can do more than aught else to furnish necessary data for a wise and comparatively permanent solution. Discussion on partisan lines is absolutely valueless, and a priori discussion will effect nothing. The unbiased study by educational experts of the fruits actually borne by experience is invaluable, and the generalizations based upon such data will show the lines upon which reform must work itself out. This is not the place to formulate the exact nature of such inquiries, but they should cover at least three heads:
I. Health.—The present report offers a valuable model to follow. More attention should be given to the social and moral environment of college-life, however, even in this point; and the discussion should more definitely concern the specifically female functions.
II. Life since Graduation.—The brief notes respecting marriages and occupations in the report discussed are all we have on this head. It should be treated with a view to determining as accurately as may be the position which the college-educated woman holds and desires to hold in the body social and politic. When we recollect the difficulty in adjusting young men's collegiate education to their life after graduation, in spite of the accumulation of infinite experience, the value of such a report in determining the lines which woman's college education should follow, in the dearth of information upon the topic, is at once seen.
III. Specific Data for Future Movements.—These should be based upon confidential revelations made by the graduates themselves, together with the testimony of college officers and physicians. It should not be limited narrowly. They should go far beyond the question of bodily health. The statement of what each had found the greatest aid and the greatest hindrance in her collegiate training would be of much value. Experience alone can decide the exact form which these inquiries should take, but their importance can hardly be over-estimated in the moral and social aspects of the case.
Education must follow the example of the special sciences. It must organize. There is organization, and to spare, in the schools themselves; what we want is organized recognition of the problems of education; organized study for the discovery of methods of solution; organized application of these methods in the details of school-life. Co-operation in research and application is the key to the problem.
My Pedagogic Creed
Article One. What Education Is
Article Two. What The School Is
Article Three. The Subject-matter Of Education
Article Four. The Nature Of Method
Article Five. The School And Social Progress
Article One.
What Education Is
I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race. This process begins unconsciously almost at birth, and is continually shaping the individual's powers, saturating his consciousness, forming his habits, training his ideas, and arousing his feelings and emotions. Through this unconscious education the individual gradually comes to share in the intellectual and moral resources which humanity has succeeded in getting together. He becomes an inheritor of the funded capital of civilization. The most formal and technical education in the world cannot safely depart from this general process. It can only organize it; or differentiate it in some particular direction.
I believe that the only true education comes through the stimulation of the child's powers by the demands of the social situations in which he finds himself. Through these demands he is stimulated to act as a member of a unity, to emerge from his original narrowness of action and feeling and to conceive of himself from the standpoint of the welfare of the group to which he belongs. Through the responses which others make to his own activities he comes to know what these mean in social terms. The value which they have is reflected back into them. For instance, through the response which is made to the child's instinctive babblings the child comes to know what those babblings mean; they are transformed into articulate language and thus the child is introduced into the consolidated wealth of ideas and emotions which are now summed up in language.
I believe that this educational process has two sides - one psychological and one sociological; and that neither can be subordinated to the other or neglected without evil results following. Of these two sides, the psychological is the basis. The child's own instincts and powers furnish the material and give the starting point for all education. Save as the efforts of the educator connect with some activity which the child is carrying on of his own initiative independent of the educator, education becomes reduced to a pressure from without. It may, indeed, give certain external results but cannot truly be called educative. Without insight into the psychological structure and activities of the individual, the educative process will, therefore, be haphazard and arbitrary. If it chances to coincide with the child's activity it will get a leverage; if it does not, it will result in friction, or disintegration, or arrest of the child nature.
I believe that knowledge of social conditions, of the present state of civilization, is necessary in order properly to interpret the child's powers. The child has his own instincts and tendencies, but we do not know what these mean until we can translate them into their social equivalents. We must be able to carry them back into a social past and see them as the inheritance of previous race activities. We must also be able to project them into the future to see what their outcome and end will be. In the illustration just used, it is the ability to see in the child's babblings the promise and potency of a future social intercourse and conversation which enables one to deal in the proper way with that instinct.
I believe that the psychological and social sides are organically related and that education cannot be regarded as a compromise between the two, or a superimposition of one upon the other. We are told that the psychological definition of education is barren and formal - that it gives us only the idea of a development of all the mental powers without giving us any idea of the use to which these powers are put. On the other hand, it is urged that the social definition of education, as getting adjusted to civilization, makes of it a forced and external process, and results in subordinating the freedom of the individual to a preconceived social and political status.
I believe each
