Abstract
THE masters in English secondary schools have in the past been a little impatient of philosophical treatises dealing with the principles underlying educational practice; they have been apt to recognise education as an art, though unwilling to give attention to writers anxious to formulate a science of education. While fond of insisting upon the value to the teacher of individuality and freedom of action, our schoolmasters have failed to understand that until they have discovered and can apply the principles of their art, they are mere empirics, each knowing only what he has learnt from personal experience. The greater attention given in America and Germany to the training of teachers has incidentally resulted in the growth of a body of able men devoted to the study of educational science. Prof. DeGarmo, of Cornell University, is one of these students of pedagogic problems, and the book before us, with its evidences of enthusiasm on every page, represents some of his recent work. Taking Schurman's dictum as his text, that “interest is the greatest word in education,” he shows how interest arises among primitive men, what its object should be, how it can be made to assist in the delimitation of the curriculum, and what relation it has to methods of teaching. Prof. DeGarmo has no sympathy with those intellectual aristocrats who cherish archaic educational ideals and deny the badge of scholarship to all who do not accept their estimate of the value of Greek and Latin. He attaches as much importance to rational instruction in science as to the making of Latin verses—“the student in the scientific, the technological br the commercial course is not inferior to his brother in the arts course difference is not inferiority.” He quotes approvingly, too, Lord Kelvin, who has said, the higher education has two purposes—first, to enable the student to earn a livelihood, and second, to make life worth living and this book should greatly assist teachers so to educate their pupils as to make both these requirements possible of attainment.
Interest and Education. The Doctrine of Interest and its Concrete Application.
By Prof. C. DeGarmo. Pp. xiii + 226. (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1902.) Price 4s. 6d. net.
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S., A. Interest and Education The Doctrine of Interest and its Concrete Application . Nature 67, 413 (1903). https://doi.org/10.1038/067413a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/067413a0