Education as a science Author:Alexander Bain Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE WORK OF THE SCHOOL. 7 For this emergency, there is one thing obvious; another less obvious; the two together exhausting the resources of the educator. ... more »The obvious thing is to fix upon whatever matters people are agreed upon. Of such the number is considerable, and the instances important. They make the universal topics of the schools. The less obvious thing is, with reference to matters not agreed upon, that the educator should set forth at what cost these doubtful acquisitions would have to be made ; for the cost must be at least one element in the decision respecting them. Whoever knows most about Education is best able to say how far its appliances can cope with such aims as softening the manners, securing self-renunciation, bringing about the balanced action of all the powers, training the whole man, and so forth. We shall see that one part of the science of Education consists in giving the ultimate analysis of all complex growths. It is on such an analysis that the cost can be calculated ; and, by means of this, we can best observe whether contradictory demands are made upon the educator. What we have been drifting to, in our search for an aim, is the work of the school. This may want a little more paring and rounding to give it scientific form, but it is the thing most calculated to fix and steady our vision at the outset. Now, for the success of the schoolmaster's work, the first and central fact is the plastic property of the mind itself. On this depends the acquisition not simply of knowledge but of everything that can be called an acquisition. The most patent display of the property consists in memory for knowledge imparted. In this view the leading inquiry in the art of Education is how to strengthen memory. We are therefore led to take account of ...« less