An inquiry into methods of initiating a teachers' training college course in education

PEOPLE who have themselves suffered from a particular disease are, not infrequently, sufficiently interested in the problem presented by the disease to study it and try to eliminate it. In other directions the same sort of thing may happen. This thesis provides a case in point, for when I was myself at Training College I felt that the work we did in Education, Psychology, and Method, was not adequate. It aroused in students little enthusiasm, gave them little light in their professional task, and left them without direction or purpose. Our course was severely practical on the one side and remotely theoretical on the other.
Two years after leaving Training College, when writing to one of my lecturers, I suggested that we should have discussed the general purpose of education before we began to study teaching method in any subject, and that as we began to study the teaching of each subject we should consider the particular contributions made by that subject to the general purpose of education. I still incline to that opinion.