man who had such an aggregation of high qualities is a great man. His going leaves us poorer (a great multitude of us who had his friendship), and it leaves the State and the nation poorer. Yet State and individuals are very much

richer for his life and work.

I should like to write it here (and many men could make the same confession) that I owe him an incalculable debt which can be paid only by an affectionate remembrance— for his cheerfulness, his humor, his inspiration and helpfulness of spirit, the example of his unswerving devotion to one high task, his balanced and happy view of life, his noble and intimate services of brotherhood. To us all and for us all, he was brother, builder, leader, a great force in our lives and in the life of his time. The people of the commonwealth--all the people of the commonwealthhad in him as true a friend and servant as was ever born in the whole long list of our patriots and heroes. None ever loved the people more truly than he. He was of us; he stood for us; he worked for us; he believed in us; and he had no ambitions but ambitions for our development. That is the measure of his greatness of nature and it should be the measure of our affectionate gratitude.

His intellectual grasp of the fundamental problems of a democracy was strong; and it was not an intellectual grasp only, but a moral grasp also. He had as clear and wellreasoned a philosophy of social improvement as Jefferson had, and he had worked it out from life-he had not merely got it from books. And he had a humor and a faith in the mass of men as genuine as Lincoln's. He was a fundamental, elemental man--not a mere product of education and environment; and this is the reason that he was of close kinship to us all. Nobody knew him who did not have much. in common with him.

A worthy statue of him, for which we have the privilege of subscribing, will do us credit; for it will show those who come after us what kind of man we set high value on— the man who nobly builds for the people and serves the people unselfishly. That is the kind of man to honor, for that kind of man is the highest product and vindication of our democracy.

Some Phases of Educational Theory*

BY WILLIAM HARRY HECK,

Professor of Education in the University of Virginia

One of my students, who slipped a little below the passing mark on his first term's work, afterwards made a suggestion to me, which I will interpret by a metaphor. When the educational stewards had run out of new courses to put on the college bill of fare, they ingeniously made another course by jumbling the old ones into a kind of hash, which they labelled Education. According to this view the Curry School at the University of Virginia is to devote itself to a pedagogical hash, a new dish now being served at most of the college and university restaurants in America, Germany, England and France, such is the binding force of international custom.

Though in reality courses in education have been developed in normal schools and colleges to meet the growing demand for trained teachers there is a deal of truth in the foregoing suggestion. Over and above the training of teachers in the art of their profession, the study of education attempts to interpret the educational process as a whole-its past, present and future value to society, its aim, its curricula, its methods, its equipment, its administration.

To use one of its own technical terms, such a study is still in the period of plastic infancy. The history of even school education carries us back almost to the dawn of civilization. The best of human experience and thought has been expressed in the educational systems of ancient and modern nations, master minds from Plato to Herbert Spencer have discussed our problems with conviction and power, both present theory and practice have proved themselves of inestimable worth, and thousands of men and women are today studying the subject in Europe and America. Yet we cannot, we probably never can, rest satisfied with the best that has been said or done in education. The subject is too

*Address delivered at the inauguration of the Curry School of Education at the University of Virginia.

vitally connected with the comprehensive and evolving life of society, is too dependent on the data furnished it by partially developed sciences and philosophies, is too baffling in its pursuit of human ideals to be finally solved, until man has reached his destination and the meaning of life is laid bare before him.

This evening I ask you to consider tentatively some of the phases of education which will tend to define its real significance. My discussion will be based upon the belief that both the child and society are physically, mentally and morally the products of a universal evolution, which has produced all the environment of the child and which exhibits the real or seeming purpose of an immanent or transcendent intelligence toward the higher and higher expressions of human life in social relations. Both the child and society seem scientifically unintelligible unless interpreted by constant reference to the evolutionary process; a theory of education which fails to consider education as growing out of, co-operating with, and furthering this process is not only out of harmony with present scientific and philosophical conclusions, but is also practically misleading in its effect on pedagogical aims and methods. So wide is the belief in evolution that educational discussions opposed to the fundamentals of such a belief would rightly be condemned by the real students of education in America and Europe.

It is a commonplace of biology that adaptation to environment is the necessity of life. Every organism, however simple, however complex, must be adjusted to the conditions in which it lives, or it dies, having forfeited its right to live. And the more complex the organism, physically and mentally, the more complex are the demands for adjustment made by the environment. Following Herbert Spencer, John Fiske thus states this truth: "Life, including also intelligence as the highest known manifestation of life, is the continuous establishment of relations within the organism in correspondence with relations existing or arising in the environment. The degree of life is low or high, according as the correspondence between internal and external relations is simple or complex, limited or extensive, partial or complete, imperfect or perfect."

This quotation will serve as a criterion by which we can judge the value of educational theory and practice. True education is a life process; therefore it must adjust the physical, mental, and moral life of the child to his physical, mental, and moral environment, to the social conditions in which he lives and to the place in those social conditions that he expects to occupy as parent, neighbor, citizen and worker. In so far as education does not give this adjustment, it narrows or dissipates the life of the child, instead of giving a broad background of social adaptation and also a sharp point of contact in his particular profession. The vital question regarding the education of the child in home and society is this: What increase of adjustment, and therefore what increase of life, will this discipline, this lesson, this activity give this particular child to his particular environment, so that he can get the most out of and give the most to that environment? This is the high, inspiring utilitarianism of the evolutionary process, harking back to the first and lowest living organism and reaching forward infinitely to the best that man can dream of for himself and for society. It is to the glory of the revolution now taking place in educational theory and practice that efforts are being made, slow but sure, to make this universal demand for adjustment the consciously systematized principle of the entire educative pro

cess.

Considering then, as a presupposition, the necessity of adjusting the living organism to its environment, we will consider, in a very brief and non-technical way, three of the problems connected with the subject of education. These problems may be suggested in the form of questions. First --What is there in the nature of society which makes necessary the education of the child that is born into it? Second-What is there in the nature of the child that makes possible and necessary the education demanded of it by soicety? Third-What is there in this relation of the child to society that should determine the purpose of the child's education? In a half hour, I can only touch upon a few answers to such questions.

Our first question concerns the necessity for education

existing in the nature of society. Education may first be defined as the means by which one generation transmits its ideals, its institutions, its science, its art to the next generation; or, conversely, education is the means by which the next generation enters into and becomes possessed of the culture of the previous generation. Not only the external products, but the inner spirit, the industrial and social tendencies of civilization cannot be inherited; the child born in America today is as free from most of them as was the savage of three thousand years ago. Without education this child would lapse back toward barbarism, and our hardearned progress, both spiritual and material, would be to him but an unrealized and dead possibility. Civilization, I repeat, is not inheritable, but must be acquired by the individuals of each and every generation. This individual acquisition of the accumulated and sifted products of human history is education, whether it be in the home, the school, the social and civic activities, or the church. Education, therefore, is not a luxury of, not an attachment to, civilization, but its very essential, its precondition.

As this apotheosis may impress some of you as platitudinal and others as exaggerated or even untrue, you will pardon me for supporting it by an excursion into the field of biology. The biologists are not yet agreed as to whether any characteristic, physical or mental, which the parent acquires, can be inherited by the offspring, though all are agreed that, even if a fact, such inheritance would not cover a large part of the acquired characteristics of the parent. We laymen ought to see the force of both these positions; but this address will give a reserved emphasis to the claims of the Neo-Darwinian school, now greatly in the majority, that the strengthening of a bird's wing, the development of a dog's instinct, the blinding of a man's eye, the trained skill of a specialist, the materialistic ideals of a community, the religious intensity of an age-all such progression or retrogression, in so far as it is acquired by the parent, cannot be inherited organically. The offspring will begin life on, or about, the same level as its parent did, with the probable addition of individual variations above or below that level; and whatever advantage the