Mental Discipline and Educational Values
REVIEWS AND CRITICISM.
- Author:
William Harry Heck,
M.A., Professor of Education in the University of Virginia. New York: John Lane Company, 1911. 2d ed., pp. 208.
Professor Heck starts off boldly with the declaration,?”It is time that recent modifications of the honored doctrine of formal discipline should have more effect on our practice.” He devotes his first chapter to an analysis of the chief problems of current pedagogy. Of these, the most difficult he considers, “the practical modification of courses and methods so as to gain from each and every part of each and every study its real, not to strive for its imagined disciplinary value.” With so great an undertaking in hand, it is just as well that Mr. Heck puts himself on the safe side by adding, “The problems of mental discipline are too unsettled at present for anyone to be dogmatic or to attempt more than brief suggestions.”
The author’s secondary purpose is “to sum up and organize the discussions and experiments,” and this he has done most ably. He remarks, “In class discussion of the doctrine of formal discipline, we have felt the need of such a symposium of opinions to put in the hands of students as a source-book for parallel reading.” This need he has filled in a highly satisfactory manner.
His own contributions, naturally, are less satisfactory,?no more so, indeed, than he modestly predicts they will be. In his chapter on “Educational Values,” he not only fails to establish a standard of “value,” but even to make clear the sense in which he is using that word. After discussing the elementary curriculum, ho concludes his final chapter on “The Secondary Curriculum” with the words, “The schools can become a vital, direct means of preparing boys and girls for environmental usefulness, especially if the school combines, simultaneously or successively, with the general course, such vocational training as will make its graduates independent economic factors in society.” “Environmental usefulness” is an excellent phrase, though of vague import. If it mean earning a living, that is just what public high schools everywhere are more or less successfully preparing young people to do at the present day. It can become a worthy ideal for future progress in education, only if the meaning of “environment” bo not too limited, and if “usefulness” be not restricted to efforts which yield an immediate financial return. Moreover, it is an accepted principle of modern psychology that man reaches his fullest development through the spontaneous, pleasurable activities called play. Mr. Ilcck has not taken play into account in his scheme of education, nor considered the disciplinary value of good sportsmanship, and this constitutes tho weakness of his otherwise admirable and serviceable little handbook. A. T. (128)
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