all science, literature, history, and art. If a school is well departmentalized, the science teacher may comfortably forget his Latin, the history teacher his Greek, the botanist his algebra, and not be ashamed. Why should one blush at ignorance of things outside one's department? Your optician will not venture to fit you out with spectacles involving prisms or cylinders; your mason requires you to send for a carpenter if you wish a hole cut through your roof; and your gardener stands aghast if you expect him to patch up a grape-trellis.

There are now no Lord Bacons or Admirable Crichtons to astound the world with their understanding of all mysteries and all knowledge. Even a savant displays what a self-taught philosopher of my acquaintance calls a proper "humiliarity" when he ventures outside the purlieus of his own departmental knowledge. He sometimes thanks God that he is not as other men are, but he is also grateful that there are some things of which he is ignorant. These are the days of specialists. Professional men must know much about a few things, may know little about most things, and do know nothing about many things; therefore departmentalization in our profession has become a necessity; and yet it has its dangers. From the very nature of the case, the specialist tends to become narrow: he runs in a groove, and an overworked groove is a rut. Then he may lose the fine sense of proportion; he is always looking through a magnifying glass at his own little field, and is in danger of becoming blind, or at least near-sighted, as to perspective. He is liable to think, or even to speak, disparagingly of other departments of knowledge, just as a fond mother realizes that all her neighbors' boys are bad. Of course there is a remedy, and the remedy lies, in part, in what I may termto speak simply the unecclesiastical latitudinarianism of the specialist's avocations; but I am indicating the dangers. Now these dangers are probably offset manyfold by advantages. For one, a man respects himself more and is more respected when he knows a subject to the core, than when he merely scratches the surface. Again, there is a Philistine advantage: an expert who can demonstrate metaphysically that a toothache is a mere myth of the material mind, or who can successfully

diagnose a brain-storm from an attack of acute indignation, is likely to reap rich rewards. Likewise, an instructor who is an expert is more likely to obtain profitable employment, than one who can teach anything" and has no preference except for the highest salary.

But just as the Roman of "that elder day, when to be a Roman was greater than to be a king," existed for the state and not for himself, I suppose the proper philanthropic and altruistic attitude for a schoolmaster to assume is that he exists-not for himself, but for some school. Then for the school, is departmentalization desirable? Again I answer, Yes; but with cautions. Often one department suffers at the hands of another, because the teacher of the latter has a more compelling method, a more magnetic presence, a more seductive manner, or a more consuming conviction of the all-importance of his subject than the teacher of the former. Of one thing I am profoundly convinced that the English department always suffers from teachers in other departments; and if you will kindly condone an unpardonable digression, I shall relate a few departmentalized experiences in proof of my contention.

I have known teachers of history who thought they were not called upon to correct the English of their pupils. Such teachers would accept without criticism statements like the following (which I copied from actual papers, and could give names and dates) so far as they do not interfere with essential history :

"The true Greek is easily recognized by his slim body, aquiline face, oval nose and moustache."

"The pediment was the ornamental effacing above the portico on a temple."

"Cæsar was said to latter years he wasn't. he wasn't.

be cruel to his captives at first, but in He was tall and had a prominent nose." "The Apella was an assembly in Sparta to which every man over thirty years old was illegible."

And the following taurine specimen from an Irish lad: "Cæsar did not want an empire, and there would probably never have been one so soon after his death, if he had lived longer and got more control."

I read, not long since, in an expository paragraph a statement that might easily pass current with an instructor in physics who should have an eye single to the importance of science, coupled with an indifference to accuracy and clearness. It ran thus:

"A magnet may be used to magnify a bar of iron. When the north pole of A is rubbed over B in the direction of the arrow, BC becomes the south pole, but BD becomes the north end."

You may not be interested in my conclusions, and if you are not, luckily they are brief, and I shall mention only four :1. Departmentalization is beneficial to the pupil, as it provides him with a more efficient instructor.

2. It is beneficial to the instructor, as it gives him opportunity for more intensive study and makes him something of a specialist.

3. But, it may prove narrowing to the instructor, provided he do not safeguard himself: for he may fall into a groove, and, as it is not necessary to know many things outside his own department, he may give way to native indolence.

4. And, the pupil may suffer at the hands of a narrow instructor who, losing much of his sense of proportion, teaches (what he really believes) that his department is the only branch of human knowledge that is really essential.

Departmental Teaching in the Grammar Grades

CHARLES S. CHAPIN, PRINCIPAL OF RHODE ISLAND NORMAL SCHOOL,

I

PROVIDENCE

N that delightful volume, From a College Window, Mr. Benson has a chapter "On Growing Older," from which I quote a few sentences expressive of my attitude in this discussion: "Instead of desiring to make conquests, I am glad enough to be tolerated. I dare, too, to say what I think, not alert for any symptoms of contradiction, but fully aware that my own point of view is but one of many, and quite prepared to revise it. In the old days I demanded agreement; I am now amused by divergence. In the old days I desired to convince; I am now only too thankful to be convinced of error and ignorance. I now no longer shrink from saying that I know nothing of a subject; in old days I used to make a pretence of omniscience, and had to submit irritably to being tamely unmasked." This is not the chirping of old age, sitting at the Skæan gate and watching the embattled hosts from afar. It is not a liberalism without convictions, nor the indifference of egotism, nor a mock humility, nor a prayer for peace from a soul wearied by the din of arms. On the contrary, it is the deliberate judgment of years of observation and experience. It is the tolerance of one who has learned that the things he does not know exceed many times the things he does know. It is the message of conservatism to a profession whose history is strewn with the wrecks of exploded theories and discarded practices. If the last quarter of a century of fertility in pedagogical thinking teaches anything, the lesson is that agnosticism in things educational is often the truest wisdom.

For example, Herbartianism enlisted able advocates by thousands and tens of thousands, captured our professional literature and convention programs, organized enthusiastic clubs, and promised to organize our minds and revolutionize our schools. To-day the literature of this once popular cult rests in peace on our upper shelves, except when the student of bygone theories

blows away the dust from the nearly forgotten volumes. Child study came preaching the evangel of new and better things, and sought to lay bare the eternal mystery of the little child's mind by investigations for which it claimed the dignity of scientific research. The meagreness of its results in comparison with its ambitions is a byword among us now. Vertical penmanship won its way by arguments hygienic, psychologic, pedagogic and practical; a single decade has driven it from the schools. The psychologizing educator is abroad in the land, criticising, reforming, exploiting, promising; but, unless I much mistake, there has never been so much skepticism as to-day among practical teachers about the value of psychology in the solution of educational problems. Some of us have come to apply to psychology the old witticism about the Bible, which described it as the book "in which each one seeks what he wants and finds what he seeks." When we are told that psychology sanctions this or that practice in teaching, we are coming to ask whose and what psychology is meant. He is a wise man, indeed, who knows or who can convince his neighbors where truth lies in many of the mooted questions of education. What a priori arguments, for example, suffice to prove the superiority of election of studies over a prescribed course, or to establish the truth or falsity of the dogma of formal discipline? We have many a credo, but no proof.

The reason for our agnosticism as to these and many other questions and problems is obvious, and is always the same.

There is no science of education. We have no ultimate standards, no authorities, and no universal postulates, except a few that are so general and so nebulous as to furnish little guidance in practice. What is called the science of education lacks almost every mark of science. It is rather a discordant jargon of theories and practices unproved and as yet unprovable. Some of these are hasty generalizations from individual experiences in local conditions, and some have been conceived in libraries and quiet studies remote from children of flesh and blood. Before it becomes a science, pedagogy will make many contributions to the rubbish heap.

Education is, and for a long time must be, empirical. Teach