BASIC PRINCIPLES IN EDUCATION

By Henry C. Morrison '95. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934.

Asserting that the instructional process will never become a scientific technology until it advances beyond simple adherence to empirically established practices, the writer sets himself the task of deriving the needed basal theory of education. To have validity such a theory must grow out of a correct understanding of the physical and social background of human life. This is no mean hurdle to surmount and there is required a comprehensive integration of data from many of the fields of science, particularly biology, physiology, anthropology, psychology and sociology. Professor Morrison is quite successful in doing this as this excellent study in educational philosophy attests.

Critical treatments of the evolutionary origin and the physiological and psychological nature of the human organism prepare the way for an analysis of personality and its development. From this array of factual evidence and well substantiated argument the position is reached that the nature of education is adjustment and preparation for right living. The reader will feel a challenge in the book if he responds to such distinctions as that the purpose of education is not to teach pupils what to do but to be the kind of persons who will know what to do.

Viewpoints developed that will provoke discussion are that some moral practices are eternal verities, that "progressive education" is fundamentally unsound, that no higher product of evolution than man will appear, that elective systems are fallacious in theory, that culture in America is declining to a lower level, that the curriculum of general education should be the culture of the race, that intelligence testing has implicit in it the assumption of an organic mind, that the great mass of our people are educable.

The reader cannot but be impressed with the thoroughness and the impartiality of the treatment and with the effort toward straight thinking. For a time he will be a bit bothered by some of the terms employed as the author proposes a set of fixed meanings based upon logic in place of the present slippery usage.