Some Experiments in High-School Instruction

Abstract

Directors of schools of education have always insisted that the high schools themselves are to be the great laboratories in which are to be worked out the intricate and difficult problems of secondary education. Public-school men, however, are slow to look upon themselves as experimenters, or to consider the public-school buildings as clinics in which the pupils are subjects for experimentation. This hesitation is justifiable, too, for are not school administrators hired to operate a system established at an enormous expense for the benefit of millions of children ? The experimenter in education, with his subject, or the training-school director with his small group of children, may perform his experiments ad libitum. If the experiments go wrong, it is well, for an error discovered is one step in the evaluation of truth, and the catastrophe that ensues causes no commotion in educational circles. But let the same experimenter adjust improperly his educational wrench to the elaborate machinery set up in the so-called public laboratories, and a roar will mount to high heaven. This, however, only proves that our experimenter must be possessed of skill and the experiments be so conducted as to eliminate wholesale catastrophe in case of maladjustment; in other words, the trained supervisor must localize and definitize his operations. He will not attempt to experiment upon a curriculum or upon a school, but upon a subject in a curriculum, and upon a small group of pupils within the subject. Unless we are to assume that educational progress is at variance with the basic laws of advancement in all other human activities which hold that truth is evaluated from error, organization evolved out of confusion, and progress attained by the spiral route of retreat and forward march, we school men will have to consent to do some-