Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE DOCTRINE OF GENERAL DISCIPLINE1 What this doctrine has cost and why it sticks. If knowledge-getting is the wise and purposeful selection from the infinity of facts and relations which exist of those which make a serious difference to life, it would seem that education owes its greatest duty to that process. But no, says one army of educators; education's first duty is to form and not to inform the mind. This is the centuries-old doctrine of formal discipline. Of it we are indeed justified in complaining, as did John of Salisbury of the Nominalist-Realist controversy which absorbed the scholars of his day, that more time has been consumed by it] than the Caesars gave to the conquest and dominion of the globe, more money wasted than Croesus counted in all his wealth. We are told in the Scriptures that we should not put new wine into old wine skins, lest the wine skins burst and the wine be spilled, but there is another and even a better reason ? the old wineskins are not sanitary. They contain the elements of decay. The new wine that goes into them will be poisoned, and we who drink of it will die. Nevertheless, this pouring of new wine into old bottles is one of the chief activities of education. This is due, it would seem, to the fact that those who so zealously pour their life work in the service of education into the old and time-infected wine skins of formal discipline have no other bottles into which to pour it. Strangely enough, even that hardy company of critics who a few years ago set about liberating the spirit of youth from the contamination of this process did its work so imperfectly that the more unthinking lovers of the old bottles still conceive themselves to be justified in using them. Indeed, they are reassured by a belief that recent ...