SOME DEMANDS OF SOCIOLOGY UPON PEDAGOGY.
AT the risk of seeming to reopen a closed incident of ancient history, this paper will take its departure from some passages in the report of the "Committee of Ten." The present aim is to define a point of view quite different from that of the committee. In emphasizing the ends to be gained in education, rather than the means to be employed, the writer wishes to be understood as having in mind the whole school career. Methods must of course be varied to meet the learner's needs at different stages of mental growth.
11 The principal end of all education" says the Conference on History, Civil Government and Political Economy, "w training" (p. 168).
The sociologist develops this noncommittal response of the oracle into the following: The end of all education is, first, com- pletion of the individual; second, implied in the first, adaptation oftlit individual to such cooperation ivith tJte society in which his lot is cast that he works at his best with the society in perfecting its own type, and consequently in creating conditions favorable to the development of a more perfect type of individual.
The Committee of Ten seems to have stopped at conclusions which tacitly assume that psychical processes in the individual are ends unto themselves. To be sure there are signs of a vague looking for of judgment, from the tribunal of larger life, upon the products of this pedagogy, but the standards of a real test seem to have had little effect upon the committee's point of view. We are told (p. 168) that the mind is chiefly developed in time ways: "(a) by cultivating the powers of discriminating observa- tion ; () by strengthening the logical faculty .... (c) by improving the process of comparison, i. e., the judgment." We are further told that "studies in language and the natural sciences arc best adapted to cultivate the habits of observation ;
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