Experimental education / by Robert R. Rusk.

  • Robert Robertson Rusk
Date:
1919
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Experimental education / by Robert R. Rusk. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Experimental Education is nevertheless not now restricted to questions which are mainly of psychological significance : it raises and investigates problems which are purely educa- tional in origin, and the solutions of which have primarily didactic significance. It has likewise adopted methods of investigation and devised instruments which can be char- acterised only as pedagogical. That the traditional pedagogy cannot be termed scientific will generally be admitted. When it did not rely wholly on experience without attaining to principles, it accepted principles without verifying them by appeal to experience. Many schemes of education have, for example, assumed the ‘recapitulation’ principle without attempting to prove the parallelism, or to determine the points of correspondence, between racial and individual development. The classical school of educationists likewise adopted the doctrine of formal training, which implied that the power derived from pursuing a certain course of study could be applied indifferently in any sphere of mental life ; but they omitted to determine to what extent a general improvement is secured by training a specific function, whether this general improvement is automatically transferred to other specific functions, or whether the im- provement of the second specific function could not be attained more economically by direct training. The new pedagogy, however, claims to be scientific. It seeks to present its data in exact quantitative terms. It is inductive rather than deductive. Instead of following the old a priori methods, it adopts the sure method of experi- ment. The claim that Education should be founded on experi- ment is not new. In the Appendix to Practical Education * by Maria and R. L. Edgeworth (1798) there is quoted Mrs Honora Edgeworth’s opinion that the art of education should be considered as an experimental science, and that many authors of great abilities had mistaken their road by following theory instead of practice. Pestalozzi * maintained that all branches of instruction demand analysis of their methods, and that the age at which each branch of instruction may be 1 First Edition (1798), vol. ii. p. 734- 2 How Gertrude Teaches, English trans., p. 126.
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