ort that
brings results with such teachers as we must employ in our work. It
would be a poor recommendation for a theory of medicine to say that it
worked all right when people are healthy but failed to help the sick.
Nor is it true that good teachers can get good results by following bad
theory. They often obtain the results by evading the theory, and when
they live up to it, the results faithfully reflect the theory, no matter
how skillful the teaching.

II

Statements like these are very apt to be misconstrued or misinterpreted
unless one is very careful to define one's position; and, after what I
have said, I should do myself an injustice if I did not make certain
that my position is clear. I believe in experimentation in education. I
believe in experimental schools. But I should wish these schools to be
interpreted as experiments and not as models, and I should wish that the
failure of an experiment be accepted with good, scientific grace, and
not with the unscientific attitude of making excuses. The trouble with
an experimental school is that, in the eyes of the great mass of
teachers, it becomes a model school, and the principles that it
represents are applied _ad libitum_ by thousands of teachers who assume
that they have heard the last word in educational theory.

No one is more favorably disposed toward the rights of children than I
am, and yet I am thoroughly convinced that soft-heartedness accompanied
by soft-headedness is weakening the mental and moral fiber of hundreds
of thousands of boys and girls throughout this country. No one admires
more than I admire the sagacity and far-sightedness of Judge Lindsey,
and yet when Judge Lindsey's methods are proposed as models for school
government, I cannot lose sight, as so many people seem to lose sight,
of the contingent factor; namely, that Judge Lindsey's leniency is based
upon authority, and that if Judge Lindsey or anybody else attempted to
be lenient when he had no power to be otherwise than lenient, his
"bluff" would be called in short order. If you will give to teachers and
principals the same power that you give to the police judge, you may
well expect them to be lenient. The great trouble in the school is
simply this: that just in the proportion that leniency is demanded,
authority is taken away from the teacher.

And I should perhaps say a qualifying word with regard to my attitude
toward educational theory. I have every feeling of affection for t