The complication and multiplication due to machinery and the increase in the mere number of facts that are known about things through scientific discoveries, make the task of mastering even one subject almost impossible. When we consider all the facts connected with teaching the geography of our own country, the climatic and geological facts, the racial facts, the industrial and political facts, and the social and scientific facts, we begin to realize the hopelessness of teaching with lists of facts. Geography embraces nearly the entire range of human knowledge and endeavor. The same thing is true to a lesser extent of all the subjects in the curriculum. The great number of facts at our disposal in any one branch makes a mere classification of the principal ones seem like a makeshift. So teachers, instead of having their classes read and then recite facts from textbooks, must change their methods. Facts present themselves to every one in countless numbers, and it is not their naming that is useful, but the ability to understand them and see their relation and application to each other. So the function of the teacher must change from that of a cicerone and dictator to that of a watcher and helper. As teachers come to watch their individual pupils with a view to allowing each one the fullest development of his thinking and reasoning powers, and to use the tables of reading, writing, and arithmetic as means of training the child’s abilities to judge and act, the rôle of the child necessarily changes too. It becomes active instead of passive, the child becomes the questioner and experimenter.
It is the rare mind that can get relations or draw conclusions from simply hearing facts. Most people must see and handle things before they can tell how these things will behave and what their meaning is. The teacher then becomes the one who sees that the pupils get proper material, and that they use it in ways that are true; that is, in ways that represent relations and conditions that actually exist outside the classroom. This is simply another way of saying that in a society where every one is supposed to take care of himself, and is supposed to have liberty of person and action, up to the point of harming others, it is pretty important that every one should be able to conduct himself, that is, to act so that he can take care of himself successfully. For its own sake society can not afford to train up its children in a way that blunts and dulls the quickness and accuracy of judgment of the baby before it begins school. If it does this it is increasing the number of incompetents who will be a drag on the whole of society. Dogmatic methods which prescribe and make for docility and passivity not only become ineffective in modern society but they actually hinder the development of the largest possibilities of society.