I started out to tell you something that we ought to be thankful
for,--something that ought to counteract in a measure the inevitable
tendencies toward pessimism and discouragement. The hopeful thing about
our present status is that we have an established principle upon which
to work. A writer in a recent periodical stoutly maintained that
education was in the position just now that medicine was in during the
Middle Ages. The statement is hardly fair, either to medicine or to
education. If one were to attempt a parallel, one might say that
education stands to-day where medicine stood about the middle of the
nineteenth century. The analogy might be more closely drawn by comparing
our present conception of education with the conception of medicine just
prior to the application of the experimental method to a solution of its
problems. Education has still a long road to travel before it reaches
the point of development that medicine has to-day attained. It has still
to develop principles that are comparable to the doctrine of lymph
therapy or to that latest triumph of investigation in the field of
medicine,--the theory of opsonins,--which almost makes one believe that
in a few years violent accident and old age will be the only sources of
death in the human race.

Education, we admit, has a long road to travel before it reaches so
advanced a point of development. But there is no immediate cause for
pessimism or despair. We need especially, now that the purpose of
education is adequately defined, an adequate doctrine of educational
values and a rich and vital infusion of the spirit of experimental
science. For efficiency in the work of instruction and training, we need
to know the influence of different types of experience in controlling
human conduct,--we need to know just what degree of efficiency is
exerted by our arithmetic and literature, our geography and history, our
drawing and manual training, our Latin and Greek, our ethics and
psychology. It is the lack of definite ideas and criteria in these
fields that constitutes the greatest single source of waste in our
educational system to-day.

And yet even here the outlook is extremely hopeful. The new movement
toward industrial education is placing greater and greater emphasis upon
those subjects of instruction and those types of methods whose
efficiency can be tested and determined in an accurate fashion. The
intimate relation between the classroom, on the one hand, an