I have been very much afraid that Dr. Harris would take refuge in the discussion of the subject of the will in which he distinguishes Herbart from others. The exclusion of the will is held as far as Herbart is concerned of moral education. Now I wish to say that Herbart has laid down more and better educational principles than any other philosopher.
The more difficult thing is not exactly the best thing for the child in the first and second grades. There was an old theory among the Latins that if the child could be made to go through the difficulties of a Latin speech, it would prepare him for the difficult things to follow. Now, we wish to have life and not dead formalism. I believe that a thoughtful study of this report will convince any one who is interested in children that it is formal, and is a production of this old idea, based upon language as the foundation of all education.
PRESIDENT W. H. HERVEY, _Teachers’ College, New York_: I find myself drawn in two directions on this question. I fain would cleave to everything that has been said this morning as containing the truth. I believe that, so far as this report and these remarks confine themselves to educational principles, any one of us may agree most heartily. Only where they descend to particular applications are we at variance. We always are at variance when we descend from the clouds, but that is no objection to the clouds. Now, I take it there are arrayed before us the two opposing camps,--the Hegelian and the Herbartian. What does the Hegelian say? In order that you may know the world you must turn your back upon yourself and lose yourself; you lose your life that you may save it. Yon leave your home plate, go to the second base, then to the third base, and you make a home run. That is a true type of all development. What, on the other hand, is the standpoint of the Herbartian? What we know depends upon what we have known. And that is true. And what we can do, according to this philosophy, depends upon the interest, the kinetic energy. About this matter of will, we have the Calvinistic theology set over against the Unitarian. Hegel’s Lord was a man of war. Herbart brings us to view the New Jerusalem. He shows us the church, not militant, but triumphant. Herbart distinguishes the good from the evil and makes it impossible for a man to do a wrong deed or to think a wrong thought, and that, I take it, is even a higher attainment than the Hegelian philosophy has thought of. Any one who develops the will by the man-of-war idea will have a sorry will upon his hands. There is, with the young child, certainly, a synthesis, a correlation, a development of taste where the analysis is suppressed and unconscious; and yet, my friends, if you attempt to educate a boy in the upper grammar grades or the high school according to the same principles as the primary grades, you make a sorry muss of it. If we would pass from the state of the child to the state of the man, it is necessary for us to go through the dry bones of analysis.