The How to Study Problem

Abstract

Strawberries may come and strawberries may go, but we have with us always. ' ' In such words the comedian calls atten tion to the prevalence of the commonplace in our lives and the occa sional sporadic spurt of genius. If he were reviewing the nature of our educational progress of the last half century he would no doubt find prunes everywhere, but the luscious fruit would be in evidence on rare occasions and its seasons of short duration. If he were limiting the scope of his activity still further and would apply his pun to our attempt to solve the how to problem I fear that he would hardly find enough genius to permit the green berry to assume a hue so deep as to make it tempting. A review of our attempt to solve this problem reveals an abun dance of activity within the realm of mediocrity?an abundance of swivel chair opinion, an abundance of generalizations from a few stray and often manipulated facts, a verbosity which has been equalled only, in the past and present, by new sciences in embryo.1 A. We started our attempt when the educator was not a sci entist, but when his chief problem consisted of selling his wares, of convincing the public that to study is a mark of good breeding, of culture, and when how to had to be interspersed with an abundance of what to in order to make the product salable. Whether the advice came from the pen of a Locke or Bacon, a Watts or Sandwick, whether written in the seventeenth or the nineteenth or twentieth century the same motive dominated the writer and the same method was used, the difference in genius probably being reflected by the degree of development of the embryo science at the time the advice was penned. B. In the course of time a new science was conceived and its embryo began a rapid development. Its growth was more rapid