Our healthy sports—but why go on? It is not my intention to ridicule the best things that the wisdom of the ages has produced. My only contention is that our methods of education are hopelessly tentative, uncertain in their effects, justifiable only on the ground that we cannot yet see clearly anything else to do. But things will change. Already there is a science of education, because people with scientific minds are thinking about the problems it presents. They are experimenting, and they are at least disclosing our ignorance. Experiments similar to those of Scientific Management are producing similar results. We are beginning to know important things about the mind, its natural development, and the method by which it works. Already we know a good deal about the conditions of remembering, enough at least to condemn, if we dared to think out the implications of our knowledge, many venerable educational practices. Some of the most important of our discoveries fall readily into line with the results of Industrial Psychology. There seems, for example, to be a natural rate of working appropriate in learning, appropriate rhythms of impression, rest and recall, by the operation of which knowledge becomes firmly embedded in the mind. When these rhythms are ignored, the evil effects of cramming are produced. Our educational methods in the school and in the university break and crush all these rhythms, and students pass out into the world with mutilated minds.
The rhythms of life, however, present in every field possibilities of extensive modification. That many needs demand a rhythmic satisfaction is well known, but there is scope for detailed investigation and experiment here. None of these natural periods seem to be absolutely fixed beyond all power of alteration. The rhythms of digestion probably vary with the fashions of the age and class, according as high teas or late dinners are in fashion. They might under certain conditions have depended upon the tides; and changes in our habits of taking nourishment would probably produce most interesting variations.