CURRENT ACTIVITIES AND INFLUENCES IN EDUCATION INTRODUCTION. EDUCATION, like the inductive sciences from which it gets much of its data, is in a state of constant change. Although there are educational principles and educational interpretations that will always be more or less permanent in their form and value, there is much in ideal and practice that takes on new aspects in the evolution of human affairs. Because of this condition of change, it is well for educators and the friends of education to have their problems and the efforts at their solution restated from time to time. Contributory influences and the way in which they affect these educational problems from year to year need also to be reviewed. Education, which has come so fully to mean preparation for life, is an important phase of the great evolutionary process which permeates all the affairs of men. It is the part of the process which makes it possible for man to progress to inherit all that is best from the past, to make the wisest use of the present, and, through the medium of these results, to blaze the way into the more hopeful things of the future. And the more clearly the present is grasped the more surely the way to this future good is seen. It is a great world of educational opportunity in which we work. It is a world in which the "impossible" and the "improbable" mean very largely the untried and the unexplored. It is a world in which knowledge pours in from every side, when the trained sense and the open mind are ready to receive it. But all paths are not to be followed and all knowledge may not be received. The past has taught us the need of being receptive; the present is emphasizing the need of our being discriminately so. In the interests of the child a careful, keen, and intelligent outlook must be maintained. |