Page:Education as the Training of Personality.djvu/29

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TRAINING OF PERSONALITY.
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enable us to define more definitely the educational point of view? In trying to show that it will help us in both these respects, I must again limit myself to a few illustrations of a point of view, anything like a complete discussion would mean a treatise on education.

In the first place, then, our view of education will help to save us from two educational heresies which are finding adherents at the present time, and which I shall call respectively the psychological and the sociological heresy. These heresies are rife because we have not yet attained to a clear delimitation of the field of education. We have not made up our minds as to what processes or results have educational significance, and what processes or results have not. We have not a clear conception of the educational point of view. Our failure in this respect is due partly to the fact that education has not yet achieved its independence of its sister sciences, psychology and sociology, from which much of its doctrine is derived. We still occasionally hear education spoken of as applied psychology, or as a branch of sociology, sometimes by those who should know better.

But this confusion of thought is detrimental both to education and, if an outsider may be allowed to say so, in some measure also to psychology and sociology. To take one point only, psychology and sociology are pure sciences, having for their object the scientific investigation of certain classes of phenomena; they are not primarily concerned with the morals to be drawn from the truths which they discover. Education, on the other hand, is a normative science of which the fundamental