The majority of them yield to the general clamor for something immediately serviceable in reference to teaching, and so they engage two or three instructors who are expected to give themselves entirely to the work of instruction, and to enlisting the support of the teachers in their several communities for their respective universities. The situation would not be so much in need of remedying if the normal schools were making any progress in research, but they too are engrossed with immediately practical affairs. They must look to other institutions—properly the universities—for new light, and they will then spread it among the people.
It is worthy of remark that a country which keenly appreciates the necessity of scientific experimentation in agriculture, and carries it on very effectively, should not think it needful to provide for similar experimentation in the care and culture of human beings during the formative period. Some one may ask whether the National Bureau of Education is not an investigating institution; and the answer is that is not intended to make, nor is it making, the slightest contribution to educational science, except in so far as the gathering of statistics regarding school attendance, the wages of teachers, the progress of new studies, as manual training and nature study and the like, may be found to bear in some way upon educational theory. It can not take the initiative in any research; it can simply report what is being done. The men who manage our educational finances have evidently imagined that since so many people are engaged in educational work they would be constantly pushing forward into the unknown, ever widening the boundaries of knowledge about human nature and the means of influencing it most effectively and economically. But it is just as reasonable to assume that practical farmers will continually develop the science of agriculture without experiment stations, or that practical doctors will develop the science of medicine without research laboratories, as to assume that practical superintendents and principals and class-room teachers will develop the science of education without special schools for investigation.
