archal times, or during the sluggish centuries of the Middle Ages, such a condition of things may have existed. The substance of the office of teaching may have been thoroughly established and universally accepted. But that is certainly not the case to-day. Nothing is sacred in these times. The iconoclast is abroad in the land. New methods, new principles demand recognition. Ambitious men seem to think that the readiest way to make a name for themselves is to call in question everything that has age. They demand a new heaven and a new earth. And we must consider that many of these demands are just. Progress is the law of life. Absolute content with what is known would mean mental stagnation. Its effect would be enfeebling upon the race. The people that quietly sit down with no higher ambition than to think over the thoughts and say over the words of their ancestors, are already struck with a mental paralysis. Man was meant to move. We are continually beckoned on to loftier heights and nobler achievements than the world has yet witnessed. But we are to remember that the new ideas that have been proposed to mankind from the time when the human mind began to be active, down to the present moment, may be divided into two classes: the permanent and the transient. Occasionally the thinker comes upon a new truth which is genuine, which hath "the eternal years of God." When this happens, a noble addition is made to the inheritance of the race. Man is thereafter forever the richer, and that in the highest and best sense. It is cheering to think that the history of the world makes known many such discoveries. Every age has had its seers, its men who have been able to see into the deep things of God. Many instances of such discoveries are well. known and often referred to. They relate to all forms of truth. There have been revelations in the moral world concerning man's duty and his destiny. Truths have come to light regarding the physical universe, truths which had been unknown. Thus it is that the nobler possessions of this race of mankind have been enlarging in amount and increasing in value. But side by side with these eternal verities men have been promulgating their guesses. There are those who in their haste to be famous, cannot take the time to make sure of the truth. And so they pour out their undeveloped crudities. They catch a passing glimpse of something that they take to be truth, and immediately apply for a patent. A thorough, impartial investigation they cannot think of waiting for. They want the glory while they are living. The consequence is that some of the teaching to which we are called to listen has no basis in genuine, long-contin. ued, faithful investigation. Sometimes these alleged discoveries seem to take possession of the talking world for a season. Sometimes a series of generations takes for highest wisdom that which turns out to be folly. The Ptolemaic astronomy was held for the quintessence of truth by the most civilized nations of the earth; but it turned out to be not only falla

cious but absolutely false. Sometimes that is taken for the highest wisdom which is only of inferior kind. The Aristotelian logic was not absolutely false, but as taught in the Middle Ages, it was far from the highest wisdom, and the Aristotelian logic held the world in its grasp for centuries. And how are these differences tested? Who determines what is permanent truth and what is only a pretense? The only tribunal competent to decide such a question is the public sentiment of mankind as expressed through long historic periods. "The voice of the people is the voice of God," was the ancient adage, and when a sufficient period has been allowed for judgment to be correctly formed, no adage is truer. The voice of the people in some moment of excitement, swayed by passion or prejudice, may be the very opposite of a divine utterance; but the voice of the people as the result of enlightening experience running through centuries, instructed by the maxims of religion and morality and by the teachings of centuries of history, the voice of the people thus qualified to speak, is indeed the voice of God. The principle that can endure the trial of free discussion, that comes out unscathed from the criticisms of a century, that commends itself to the sober judgment of men, long after the tempest of dispute has died away,-such a principle may be accepted with confidence. Now it sometimes happens that questions coming up for discussion do not receive a sufficient amount of attention from the soundest thinkers and from the mass of the people to command adequate consideration, to challenge the judgment of a nation or race upon their merits. These questions are agitated more or less by their partisans, pro and con, but they never come before the great jury. The thought of the age is not really given to them. The "vox Dei" does not pronounce upon them. There have been times when the educational question was thus obscured and subordinated. But it is so no longer. The question is fairly before us. It will not down. The world is listening to the arguments upon it. It has the ear of the court and the jury. And whoever has a wise word to utter, whoever has a wise step to propose, whoever can clearly state a truth which has not been previously discerned, can have a hearing. His argument will be considered, his suggestion will be received, and at last will be treated as it deserves. In the fullness and thoroughness of this discussion is our hope. We believe that at last sound principles will be established. The enlightened public sentiment of mankind will discern the truth from the error. In the end a correct system of pedagogy will be evolved and firmly established. In the long run the voice of the people will indeed be the voice of God on this as on other questions.

In this process many of the specious theories of to-day will vanish. Some, possibly, that have been most loudly proclaimed. But nothing that is true will be lost. In this matter we may profitably learn from the past. We are to-day gleaning from bygone worthies, sifting their utterances, ac

cepting this, rejecting that. We sit in judgment upon Comenius, Pesta lozzi, Arnold, and Froebel. By all these are we taught, but we accept none of them in all details. The central truths taught by these men we value and use, but we do not commit ourselves to the over-emphasis of some of their favorite points.

And thus it will be in the future; only, I think, the future critic will be more discriminating than we have been. The work we are doing to-day, the words we are uttering, the principles we are enunciating will be weighed and passed upon by men more thoroughly fitted for the work than we are. Thus the science of education will be perfected by the honest thinking, by the hard work, and in spite of the mistakes of many thousands of teachers and educational writers.

Fellow teachers, is there not some inspiration in the thought that we, who are participating in the work of this vast gathering, are laboring upon the greatest problem of this age? Coming from all parts of this free country, exchanging views that have been developed in states and territories remote from each other and greatly differing from each other in edu cational facilities, we are here to take counsel in respect to the most momentous enterprise now carried forward in this country or in the world. Let this thought exalt our hopes. Let it kindle our enthusiasm. Let it awaken our most careful thinking. Let it arouse our sense of responsibility. Let it also dignify our proceedings. May we learn to deal with a worthy cause in a worthy and becoming spirit.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND

PEDAGOGICAL

VALUE OF THE MODERN METHODS OF

ELEMENTARY CULTURE.

THE SOCRATIC ELEMENT.

PROF. J. W. STEARNS, * WISCONSIN STATE UNIVERSITY.

The pedagogic element of elementary education secures the most vitalizing and rapid contact of the mind of the teacher with the mind of the pupil. We may readily distinguish several forms of mental contact. We may recognize first, that most familiar one upon which, largely, school instruction has for a long period rested. It depends upon the receptive power of the pupil. It appeals to this, and its end is secured only when test of memory will give up correctly that which has been given to it.

I might distinguish, in the second place, that form of contact which has for its purpose to develop the power of doing. It aims to secure skill; its process is essentially criticism, and derision and criticism, until the organism has grown to a certain way of acting and responding rapidly and accurately when called upon.

I have said that the Socratic element furnishes the most vitalizing form of contact. And it is vitalizing for this reason, that its purpose is not with the receptive powers and the memory essentially, and is not with. the active physical powers, aiming at skill in the use of the body, but that its direct appeal is to thought powers, to the radical action of the human soul.

By the Socratic element, then, we mean that motive by which the teacher calls out the original thought activity of the pupil. It requires very great skill to do this; not merely knowledge, but skill and power. As the mind acts, the teacher is called upon to perceive the significance of its action, interpret it properly and to apply that sort of guidance. which is needed that it may bring forth its best fruit. Here, then, a powerful man, or a magnetic woman, is able to exert the most vitalizing force upon the mind of the pupil. It is customary-and I think the cus

* Reported by a stenographer.

tom is a wise one and founded upon fact-it is customary to regard the Socratic method after the two forms observed by the great master and founder of it. The first one of these is commonly designated as the negative form. There is a certain propriety in this designation, though not altogether satisfactory. Its supreme end, so far as the information is concerned, is descriptive. It is the process by which errors are corrected, by which defects are revealed; not directly and by deduction, but indirectly, and by questioning. When wisely conducted, it compels the pupil to take his information into his own mind, and hold it, to allow his consciousness to play about it, until its very suggestions and significance come out, and until the errors and concealed knowledge are made apparent to him by the operations of his own mind. If we had seen the philosopher on the streets at Athens, we should have discovered nothing striking in the method of his intercourse. He is a man talking with men, talking familiarly, talking about common things. When an error is made on the part of his antagonist, he does not pronounce it wrong. That is not his attitude; that he does not do, because of the extreme humility of the position. In his own time, he was pronounced the wisest man in Greece, and he claimed to have discovered wherein that wisdom lay. Other men thought they knew he was aware that he did not know, and in this lay his wisdom. Hence he was not called upon to teach the positive truth, only to reveal the fallacies of those with whom he dealt. By the most shrewdly conducted questioning, wonderfully subtle and keen, he led his antagonist step by step from a position which seemed simple and self-evident, on into that other conclusion, which finally rendered it impossible for him to hold the opinion with which he started

out.

:

This is negative and destructive so far as this part then is concerned. But we should lose its great significance if we stopped here. It is the effect upon mind, this supremely stimulating action which never passes from under that magic questioning without feeling that there had been stirred in him a necessity to know that which he had before thought he knew. The mind could not rest under such a sense of failure as came upon it, when the sudden flash of the final question revealed how indisputable his position was.

And now, allow me to say, that even for young pupils there is nothing so effective in awakening original mental activity, where thought-power exists, as these negative, destructive germs. We are altogether too anxious to plant the seeds of truth, we have not enough faith in humanity; and lack confidence in the right working of a wholesome child-mind. If we simply reveal error, many times he will set himself right, and to have done that is to have learned to think. But besides that, it is of very great value in revealing, or developing the self