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EDITED BY MARTIN G. BRUMBAUGH, PH.D. LL.D. PROFESSOR OF PEDAGOGY, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, AND COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION FOR PUERTO RICO
Professor of Pedagogy, University of Pennsylvania
By NATHAN C. SCHAEFFER, Ph.D., LL.D., Superintendent of Public Instruction for the State of Pennsylvania. 351 pages. Cloth, $1.25.
By ISAAC SHARPLESS, President of Haverford College. 385 pages. Illustrated. Cloth, $1.25.
By DR. E. L. KEMP, Principal of East Stroudsburg Normal School. 385 pages. Cloth, $1.25.
By EDWARD FRANKLIN BUCKNER, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and Education in the University of Alabama. 309 pages. Cloth, $1.25.
BY NATHAN C. SCHAEFFER, PH.D., LL.D. SUPERINTENDENT OF PUBLIC INSTRUCTION FOR THE STATE OF PENNSYLVANIA
PHILADELPHIA J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY 1906
COPYRIGHT, 1900 BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.
The progress of educational thought during the closing years of this century has been marvellous. Professional schools have created a demand for professional teaching by giving an increasing group of skilled instructors to our schools. This professional activity has caused our leading cities to provide training-schools, as integral parts of the city system of education. Finally, our great universities have established departments of pedagogy for the higher training in education. As a result, the leading positions in higher schools and in supervision are more and more demanding professionally trained leaders.
In this auspicious awakening for professional leadership there has come an increasing demand for standard treatises upon the fundamental problems of education. Treatises upon the history, methods, principles, and systems of education have appeared with astonishing frequency. That many of these are commercial treatises—made to sell—is doubtless true. There is always a great temptation to profit by an active demand. Well-disposed but not always widely trained and broadly cultured teachers, who have achieved a local success with a method that owed its virtue to the personality of its author and not to its intrinsic worth, have been tempted into authorship. The wiser and nobler minds in the profession wait. The days of unrest and experimentation, breeding discord and confusion, have in part passed away, and the time has come when the products of all this divergent activity may be put to the test of clear analysis and adequate experience. This is especially true in the domains of historic and philosophic inquiry. In experimental activity, touching the problems of psychic life as related to its sensorium, much has been done in a tentative way. Much must yet be done to produce results of enduring significance.