The third question--concerning the nature of the child--cannot be so
briefly answered. In fact, it cannot be fully answered at the present
time. We must know what the child's original nature is. This means that
we must know the instincts and all the other inherited capacities and
tendencies. We must know the laws of building up habits and of acquiring
knowledge, the laws of retention and the laws of attention. These
problems constitute the subject matter of educational psychology, and at
present can be only partially solved. We have, however, a very
respectable body of knowledge in this field, though it is by no means
complete.

The answer to the fourth question is in part dependent upon the progress
in answering the third. Economical methods of training children must be
dependent upon the nature of children. But in actual practice, we are
trying to find out the best procedure of doing each single thing in
school work; we are trying to find out by experimentation. The proper
way to teach children to read, to spell, to write, etc., must be
determined in each case by independent investigation, until our
knowledge of the child becomes sufficient for us to infer from general
laws of procedure what the procedure in a particular case should be. We
venture to infer what ought to be done in some cases, but generally we
feel insecure till we have proved our inference correct by trying out
different methods and measuring the results.

Education will not be fully scientific till we have definite knowledge
to guide us at every step. What should we teach? When should we teach
it? How should we teach it? How poorly we answer these questions at the
present time! How inefficient and uneconomical our schools, because we
cannot fully answer them! But they are answerable. We can answer them in
part now, and we know how to find out the answer in full. It is just a