CORRELATION OF FIELDS DR. JOHN DEWEY'S TOPIC

The road out of our present educational confusion lies through the use of projects which cut across the fenced-in-fields of isolated "subjects" and make numerous fields of study contribute to the finished thesis or program, said Dr. John Dewey in delivering the Inglis Lecture in Secondary Education before a capacity audience in the New Lecture Hall last night.

The lecturer is Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Columbia University, and William James Lecturer at Harvard during the current half of the academic year. The Inglis Lecture is an annual event, given under the auspices of the Graduate School of Education in memory of Professor Alexander Inglis.

The subject of his lecture was announced as "Educational Confusion and Conflict." The confusion which he found in education seemed to him the inevitable product of our age, in which so much learning has been evolved so rapidly, and superimposed upon the traditional, classical studies.

He drew the distinction, between a "study" and studying. Secondary education he finds to be dominated by "studies", as for instance physics, and mathematics, without recognition of the extent to which these subjects cross-fertilize and interpenetrate each other in their higher reaches. The student in the elementary and secondary grades learns by rote the body of material supposed to belong to each of these separate subjects. Long afterwards, or not all, there is revealed to him the exciting implications of one subject for another.

Educators, faced with this situation, have turned, said Professor Dewey, to organizing the field, subdividing the "studies" and reducing their subject matter to a rigid body of material, to be lifted to the back of the student and carried until examination. Such a solution of the difficulty is not, however, the one furnished by everyday life.

Nor is it the solution offered by the higher reaches of science. In life, as in the research institute, the lines break down. The municipal architect must be a jack-of-all-trades within the orbit of his particular calling, able to judge, if he cannot actually execute, work of an electrical, mechanical or artistic nature, and of very varied content, ranging from the most technical to the most theoretical. Only in projects, patterned after this approach to reality, could Dr. Dewey see relief from latter-day conflicts.

Recent critics of university education, whose criticisms might be as justly levelled at secondary schools, had called in question the position of the vocational school, as for instance the college of commerce, or dentistry, or household arts within the university. Concealed in their criticism were two problems, not one, as they seemed to imply. The first dealt with the legitimacy of the subjects in hand as running-mates for traditional subjects such as theology, medicine, and law. The second dealt with the method of teaching these subjects.

Professor Dewey felt that the question of legitimacy might be dismissed by recalling that the now traditional subjects had themselves to fight for recognition. It was the question of method or approach to the expounding of these subjects which seemed to him of importance. The project was the method which out of several alternatives, seemed to have most to recommend it