The Discovery Of The Child

4 THE DISCOVERY OF THE CHILD

Instead of that, practical progress in the school required
real co-ordination between the guidance of study and of
thought, such as is required directly in the most important
branches of science which would raise the teachers' level of culture
from the state to which they are confined today. To make provi-
sion for tbis eminently practical idea there was founded in Rome
University a Faculty for Pedagogy, with the intention of raising
Pedagogy from being merely a secondary branch of the Faculty
of Philosophy, as it had been hitherto in Italy, to being an inde-
pendent Faculty, which like that of Medicine would include
various subjects, among which would be Pedagogic Hygiene,
Pedagogic Anthropology and Experimental Psychology.

, Nevertheless these sciences continued to move along their
own ways, and Pedagogy itself remained in the old philosophic
obscurity in which it had been born, without letting itself be
touched, far less be transformed.

It was a mistake to suppose that by carrying the stones of
hard, dry experiments from the laboratory into the old, ruinous-
school one could rebuild it; this narrow way could not lead to
renovation in the art of preparing new generations.

Furthermore, to train teachers in the principles of experi-
mental science is not easy in practice. Teaching them in the
most painstaking fashion anthropometry and psychometry only
resulted in our producing machines, the utility of which became
very problematical. By teaching them to experiment, new teachers,
were certainly not created. And above all the educators were left
on the threshold of experimental sciences, and were not admitted
to their noblest and most intimate precincts, where the scientists-
are created.

What in fact is a scientist?

Certainly it is not the man who is capable of manipula-
ting all the physical apparatus in a laboratory,. or who can
carry out with complete confidence the reactions in a chemical
laboratory, or who knows how to prepare microscopic sections in
biology* It is very often persons much below the standing of