Changed they emphatically are, whether for worse or better. Almost every scientific, medical, and sociological discovery of the century has influenced the school. The single theory of the microbe as the cause of disease has well-nigh revolutionized it. It does not require a very long memory to reach back to the days of slates and slate rags, with their attendant horrors of sliminess and sucked pencils. In those dark ages, too, a school-book was used by successive generations of children for as long as its print was legible to the keenest eye. Lead-pencils were collected at the end of the day and dealt out again promiscuously, and, marvellous to reflect upon, several children survived their schooling.
In these days the well-equipped and well-managed school-room is as sanitary as a hospital ward; sterilizing and fumigating are part of the regular work, and every book and pencil undergoes such treatment before being transferred from one child to another. The number of cubic feet of air, per child, per hour, is calculated and provided for. The designing of seats for school children is a matter which occupies the attention of men whose reputation is international, and whole schools of philosophy busy themselves to determine the sequence in which the different formal studies shall be presented.
In these halcyon days when Botany doffs her cap and gown and associates with ordinary mortals in the friendly guise of "How to Know the Wild Flowers," "Nature's Garden," and other enticing disguises; when ornithology takes such friendly shapes as "A Kentucky Cardinal" and "Bird Life"; when physiology becomes "How to Grow Young" and "What Ails the Baby"; when even political economy reaches the ordinary plane at the hands of Messrs. Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and Charles Edward Russell--we soon expect psychology to burst its academic bonds. It has already made one or two tentative appearances, and it was moderately well received; but some day, and soon, a prophet will arise to preach it with a yet more popular voice.
Then shall mother and teacher sweetly lisp of the "fringe of apperception," "the stream of consciousness," "inhibition," "ideal motor action," and "the tabula raza." Psychology has, I am aware, an unappealing sound. But let no one imagine that it is not or, rather, cannot be made interesting. We cannot always catch a bird, find a flower, or unearth a social evil; but every one, under all conditions and at all times, has a psychology in full working order concealed about him, and the art of teaching in its last analysis is applied psychology.