THE MEANING OF EDUCATION Those who have an acquaintance, however cursory, with the history of human thought well remember how bitter and how persistent have been the controversies of philosophers and metaphysicians in respect to terms of every-day Discussions on such familiar words as substance, cause, idea, and matter have shaken the schools for ages. It seems to be a fact that when a term is somewhat unusual and remote from our experience and our interest, we are apt readily to be able to assign to it a definite significance and a concrete meaning; but when it is a term with which we are familiar in our every-day experience and conversation, we often feel its significance and its import, and yet find great difficulty in defining it accurately in logical or in scientific terms. › education I shall discuss the meaning of Infancy and Relation of Education just because the terms are familiar, evolution to because the ideas are commonplace, and because, as it seems to me, we so often fail to grasp their profound and far-reaching significance. The point of view from which I shall Significance of the lengthening period of infancy speak of them is the one given us by that remarkable generalization which has come to be known as the doctrine of evolution, a theory which we all associate with the nineteenth century, but which, nevertheless, was seen by the thinkers of the ancient world, by the lightning flashes of their genius, in what is after all very much the form in which the clear sunlight of modern scientific demonstration presents it to us. The doctrine of evolution has illuminated every problem of human thought and human action. It is a mere truism to say that it has revolutionized our thinking; but it is equally true that we have in very many cases failed to accept the consequences of the revolution and to understand them in all their important applications. It seems to me that in no department of our interest and activity is this failure more complete, speaking generally, than in that which relates to the great human institution of education. The two chief contributions that light up this doctrine from the point of view that I wish to occupy are those that were made by Mr. Alfred Russell Wallace and by Mr. John Fiske. It was Mr. Wallace who pointed out,' 1 See Natural Selection and Tropical Nature (London, 1891), pp. 167-214. forty odd years ago, that the theory of evolution as applied to man could sustain itself only if it were acknowledged and admitted that there came a time in the history of animal types and forms when natural selection seized upon psychical or mental peculiarities and advantages and perpetuated them rather than merely physical peculiarities and advantages. That is the first and in a sense, perhaps, the greater of these contributions, for it has enabled us to understand the place of man in the order of the cosmos. Then, in less than a generation, the remarkable insight of Mr. John Fiske explained for us on physiological and psychological grounds the part played by the lengthening period of infancy in the animal species.1 It is from that doctrine of Mr. Fiske that I take my point of departure in the present argu ment. We have come to understand that evolution regards us all as individual centres of activity, influenced by our surroundings and reacting upon them. We have come to understand that our physical, our mental, and our moral life is the gradual growth or development of what may be conceived of as a point travelling through an ever-widening series of circles, un 1 See The Meaning of Infancy (Boston, 1909). til, in this ripe and cultivated age, the point has come to include within the circumference that it traces all that we call the knowledge or acquirement or culture of the educated man. The doctrine of infancy, as it has been explained to us, relates itself directly to that figure and to that method of explanation. If we contrast or compare the lower orders of animal life with the higher, and particularly with the human species, we are at once struck by the fact that in the lower orders of existence there is no such thing as infancy. We observe that the young are brought into the world able to take care of themselves, to react upon their environment at the mere contact of air or food, to breathe, to digest, and to live an individual existence. We are further struck by the fact, on examining the structure of animals of that kind, that there is no nervous system or organization present, except such as is necessary to carry on what are called reflex actions. There is no central storage warehouse; there is nothing corresponding to the human brain; and there is no action possible for animals of that type in which any considerable time can elapse between the impulse which comes in from the world without and the responding or reacting movement or action on the part of the |