ervice, and which
permit present-day teachers to concentrate within a single generation
the growth and development and progress that the empirical method of
trial and error could not encompass in a millennium.

The teaching of English merits treatment by this method. I recommend
strongly that you give the plan a trial. You may not get immediate
results. You may not get valuable results. But in any case, if you
carefully respect the scientific proprieties, your experience will be
worth vastly more than ten times the amount of crude experience; and,
whether you get results or not, you will undergo a valuable discipline
from which may emerge the ideals of science if you are not already
imbued with them. I always tell my students that, even in the study of
science itself, it is the ideals of science,--the ideals of patient,
thoughtful work, the ideals of open-mindedness and caution in reaching
conclusions, the ideals of unprejudiced observation from which
selfishness and personal desire are eliminated,--it is these ideals that
are vastly more important than the facts of science as such,--and these
latter are significant enough to have made possible our present progress
and our present amenities of life.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 16: A paper read before the English Section of the University
of Illinois High School Conference, November 17, 1910.]

~XI~

THE NEW ATTITUDE TOWARD DRILL[17]

Wandering about in a circle through a thick forest is perhaps an
overdrawn analogy to our activity in attempting to construct educational
theories; and yet there is a resemblance. We push out hopefully--and
often boastfully--into the unknown wilderness, absolutely certain that
we are pioneering a trail that will later become the royal highway to
learning. We struggle on, ruthlessly using the hatchet and the ax to
clear the road before us. And all too often we come back to our starting
point, having unwittingly described a perfect circle, instead of the
straight line that we had anticipated.

But I am not a pessimist, and I like to believe that, although our
course frequently resembles a circle, it is much better to characterize
it as a spiral, and that, although we do get back to a point that we
recognize, it is not, after all, our old starting point; it is an
homologous point on a higher plane. We have at least climbed a little,
even if we have not traveled in a straight line.

Now in a figurative way this explains how we have