A Reason for Study
W E HAVE become so habituated in education to doing things by the copybook method that it disturbs our composure to question why certain lessons are taught or certain assignments made. It disturbs our composure even more when we are asked to justify the high-school or college curriculum in the light of its genuine contributions to modern living. It is true that if our professional reflexes are active we respond readily with the passwords which constitute the educational patter of the past century: culture, knowledge, refinement, scholarship, efficiency, adjustment. Thus we mouth our reasons, guided often by a sense of euphony rather than a sensitive conscience. We have built up a number of shibboleths that admit us theoretically to the professional fraternity, but our practice suffers from an alien lisp. Our goals we discuss in one book; our educational methods in another; and the subject-matter of the curriculum in a third. And when we are making, or reading, the third book, how remote seem the glowing phrases of the first! Being subject-matter minded, we revel in the analysis of obscure data; we compile mountains of fact; we tax the memories of the rising generation with verbose definitions of this, that, and the other; we give lectures on the love life of the lunar moth; we teach seventeen dead or decadent uses of the subjunctive with the academic gusto and the grim determination characteristic of our pedagogical personalities; we point out relentlessly and with rare discernment that "he" is masculine, "she" is feminine, and "it" is neuter; and we try to lend some mystic quality to our wisdom by batteries of tests in all the minutiae of information with which we bulge the covers of the textbooks. Most heartily do we yearn for a directive consciousness of purpose on the part of teachers and textbook makers, for the recognition and acceptance of basic service values in the subject-matter taught, for a vital correlation between learning and living. The restoration of public confidence in education depends, in great measure, upon bridging the gap between the curriculum and current needs-both individual and social. Many will no doubt contend that "objectives " are already written large in the literature of education. They will say that students, teachers, and curriculum committees have long since grown weary of the ceaseless exhorta-