Human Nature in Politics: Third EditionWallas, Graham
Science
Human Nature in Politics: Third Edition
Wallas, Graham
Political ethics; Politics, Practical
In pedagogy also, Locke, and Rousseau, and Herbart, and the many-sided
Bentham, based their theories of education upon their conceptions of
human nature. Those conceptions were the same as those which underlay
their political theories, and have been affected in the same way by
modern knowledge. For a short time it even looked, as if the lecturers
in the English training colleges would make the same separation between
the study of human institutions and human nature as has been made in
politics. Lectures on School Method were distinguished during this
period from those on the Theory of Education. The first became mere
descriptions and comparisons of the organisation and teaching in the
best schools. The second consisted of expositions, with occasional
comment and criticism of such classical writers as Comenius, or Locke,
or Rousseau; and were curiously like those informal talks on Aristotle,
Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, which, under the name of the Theory of
Politics, formed in my time such a pleasant interlude in the Oxford
course of Humaner Letters. But while the Oxford lecture-courses still, I
believe, survive almost unchanged, the Training College lectures on the
Theory of Education are beginning to show signs of a change as great as
that which took place in the training of medical students, when the
lecturers on anatomy, instead of expounding the classical authorities,
began to give, on their own responsibility, the best account of the
facts of human structure of which they were capable.
The reason for this difference is, apparently, the fact that while
Oxford lecturers on the Theory of Politics are not often politicians,
the Training College lecturers on the Theory of Teaching have always
been teachers, to whom the question whether any new knowledge could be
made useful in their art was one of living and urgent importance. One
finds accordingly that under the leadership of men like Professors
William James, Lloyd Morgan, and Stanley Hall, a progressive science of
teaching is being developed, which combines the study of types of school
organisation and method with a determined attempt to learn from special
experiments, from introspection, and from other sciences, what manner
of thing a child is.
Modern pedagogy, based on modern psychology, is already influencing the
schools whose teachers are trained for their profession. Its body of
facts is being yearly added to; it has already caused the abandonment of
much dreary waste of time; has given many thousands of teachers a new
outlook on their work, and has increased the learning and happiness of
many tens of thousands of children.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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