23 THE 23 PEDAGOGICAL SEMINARY. AN INTERNATIONAL RECORD OF EDUCATIONAL LITERATURE, EDITED BY G. STANLEY HALL, President of Clark University and Temporary Professor of Psychology and Education. VOL. I. 1891. WORCESTER, MASS.: PUBLISHED BY J. H. ORPHA. H EDITORIAL. Seminary and laboratory are now perhaps the noblest words in the vocabulary of higher education. The former is now coming to mark the latest, closest, and most fruitful contact of the best instructors with the most advanced learners. It inherits and perpetuates the best traditions of the ancient Grove and Porch, the platonic dialogue and esoteric mysteries. It is the pedagogic adytum which only the few fit must enter. Here teaching and learning sometimes become a passion. Here the great masters have inspired, and then passed on the sacred torch of pure science to the their chosen disciples. When German universities were growing dry and formal, it was the seminary that unfolded new methods and re-animated every humanistic department in which it obtained a foot-hold, and many of the most important recent advances, especially in the fields of history and antiquities, are direct products of seminary impulses. Even the method of lectures, although by no means superseded as yet, is sometimes subordinated and made tributary to seminaries. In France still more recently, where nearly all higher instruction was given in the form of lectures open to the general public, it was seminaries under several names, which have inspired several thousand of the best trained and most gifted future leaders to a devotion to pure science unparalleled in the history of that country. The seminary movement had inveterate prejudices to overcome, and was accused of being cloisteral, mystic and secret; but in the words of a French leader, it has shown how great a light and heat could be evolved by a policy of university concentration, which was the exact opposite of university extension, which excluded the public and focused all its care upon the few best. The entire success of a seminary depends on the rigor with which all but the few who are able and fit to be active participants are excluded. A single feeble or untrained man mars its tone. A seminary is not a library club where books are shown and described, or reading courses marked out; it is not a smoke-talk with subsequent questions, nor a conference for joint conversation on a pre-announced subject, nor a lyceum |