nd not made, and yet
a careful investigation of the efficiency of elementary teachers shows
that, when such teachers were ranked by competent judges, specialized
training stood out as the most important factor in general efficiency.
In this same investigation, the time-honored notion that a college
education will, irrespective of specialized training, adequately equip a
teacher for his work was revealed as a fallacy,--for twenty-eight per
cent of the normal-school graduates among all the teachers were in the
first and second ranks of efficiency as against only seventeen per cent
of the college graduates; while, in the two lowest ranks, only sixteen
per cent of the normal-school graduates are to be found as against
forty-four per cent of the college graduates. These investigations, I
may add, were made by university professors, and I am giving them here
in a university classroom and as a university representative. And of
course I shall hasten to add that general scholarship is one important
essential. Our mistake has been in assuming sometimes that it is the
only essential.

Very frequently the controlled experience of scientific investigation
confirms a principle that has been derived from crude experience. Most
teachers will agree, for example, that a certain amount of drill and
repetition is absolutely essential in the mastery of any subject. Every
time that scientific investigation has touched this problem it has
unmistakably confirmed this belief. Some very recent investigations
made by Mr. Brown at the Charleston Normal School show conclusively that
five-minute drill periods preceding every lesson in arithmetic place
pupils who undergo such periods far in advance of others who spend this
time in non-drill arithmetical work, and that this improvement holds not
only in the number habits, but also in the reasoning processes.

Other similar cases could be cited, but I have probably said enough to
make my point, and my point is this: that crude experience is an unsafe
guide for practice; that experience may be refined in two ways--first by
the slow, halting, wasteful operation of time, which has established
many principles upon a pinnacle of security from which they will never
be shaken, but which has also accomplished this result at the cost of
innumerable mistakes, blunders, errors, futile efforts, and
heartbreaking failures; or secondly, by the application of the
principles of control and test which are now at our s