a small body of highly-specialised men and women of particularly high capacity and attainments, and with a large amount of initiation."[1] And again, "Under the increasingly centralised system that we have foreshadowed we find little promise in the future of a diminution in the number of institutionalised children. The tendency is clearly towards increasing the number and intensifying the type."[2]
I can only say that such a future appears to me to be one which we must strive with all our earnestness to avert, for in it education would be like Homer's ghost in Hades—only a shadow of its former self. Unfortunately we cannot deny the tendency to magnify the machine. We hear of the introduction of methods, whether Montessori or other, as if method in itself, apart from personality, were a remedy for our weakness. I doubt, however, whether this tendency is on the increase.
Not that method is unimportant. A master must have as the foundation for his work a mastery of his material. He must be a skilled workman, and his material is perhaps the hardest of all to work, namely, human nature. Hence we welcome all the light which can come from a study of psychology and of teaching methods new and old. And still more must we insist upon the necessity for that personal sympathy with boys of which we have already spoken. But a mastery of his material is only one branch of the master's interest. He must have also a social interest in education. He is the organ of the community for handing on its life.
- ↑ Evolution of Educational Theory, p, 187.
- ↑ ibid., p. 388.
