Nothing escapes the processes of change in a changing world. Try as we may to stem the tide of advancing time by clinging to old systems and old ideas, the process goes on making itself manifest in the unrest of dissatisfaction. Systems that once worked or seemed to work well enough are found wanting because life is no fixed and static thing but an unfoldment. Mistakes are uncovered by new knowledge and new knowledge during the last twenty-five years has been so extensive that the very foundations of the old have fallen away. We find ourselves bewildered amidst the debris and we are uncertain as to the method of rebuilding because we know so little of ourselves.

A pamphlet has just come into my hands which is a straw in the wind that is full of straws. It concerns itself with the philosophy of education, is called "A Reconstructed Theory of the Educative Process," was written by William Heard Kilpatrick, professor of education at Teachers' College, Columbia University, and reveals the inadequacy of the system under which the new generation is being educated. Professor Kilpatrick launches upon a new interpretation of the verb "to learn," utilizes much of the findings of psychology and biology and contends that "learning " must take into account the whole organism of the child, his whole self, and must prepare the child for living. He points out that the whole child is present and active in every response, that no part of the child can be ignored in the integrated educational process.

In other words, he sees education as that process which must teach the child how to cope with experience, not what he must learn from books. Instead, as now, teaching a child to accept and acquire authoritative knowledge the child must, if education is to prepare him for successful living, be shown how to employ himself in all the activities of life. This entails a knowledge of the whole child, his integrated reactions to experience, a subject about which, in practice, nothing seems to be known by the educators.

Mr. Kilpatrick admirably analyses the deplorable state of the existing educational process, and the breadth of his attitude towards a conception of what education ought to be is a striking sign of the times. He is all profundity in his philosophical approach to his theme, and when he observes that "we must think always of the self ­ the self-directive self, so to speak, that is to emerge," he places his erudite finger upon the crux of the matter, leaving it at the same time just about where he found it ­ in the category of theory. When he writes: "What we seek then is not an education which confirms our ideas and our ways in those under our care but such a self-direction in all as means the ever-growing will to direct life accordingly with sensitive regard for all concerned," Mr. Kilpatrick is uttering a profound ideal, and when he says, further, that "it is always the growing of 'the whole child' which concerns us, all sides of life integrated within an effective growing whole," he is enunciating an important principle and displaying an extraordinary ignorance of any technique by which that principle might be put into practice.

Now the remarkable point is not that our intellectual leaders of thought have no concrete plan for the correction of defects in our knowledge and procedures, but that they go blithely on either unaware of or unwilling to recognize important facts which happen to arise outside their own sacred precincts. It is even more astonishing in the case of Mr. Kilpatrick that he seems unaware of the technique of F. Matthias Alexander which happens to provide the practical answer to his theoretical conjectures It is astonishing when it is realized that Dr. John Dewey, a colleague of Mr. Kilpatrick's at Columbia, has been an ardent supporter of Mr. Alexander's principles for years. But Mr. Kilpatrick seems never to have known that Dr. Dewey has written that "Mr. Alexander has found a method of detecting precisely the correlation between these two members, physical-mental, of the same whole, and for creating a new sensory consciousness of new attitudes and habits." "It is a discovery," Dr. Dewey continues, "which makes whole all scientific discoveries, and renders them available, not for our undoing, but for human use in promoting our constructive growth and happiness. The method is not one of remedy; it is one of constructive education. Its proper field of application is with the young, with the growing generation, in order that they may come to possess as early as possible in life a correct standard of sensory appreciation and self-judgment."

Mr. Alexander's principles and technique have not been discovered and perfected under the lamp, but in practice. The application of his technique has proven effective in therapeutics and in education. The principle of correlation, the approach to what Mr. Kilpatrick repeatedly terms "the whole child" has been used in practice, and with remarkable results in Alexander's school in London. This technique is no longer in the experimental stage; it is demonstrably scientific. And Mr. Kilpatrick, if he is interested in a concrete plan for realizing his conception of what education ought to be, owes it to the coming generations to examine Mr. Alexander's work in practice. There are three books expounding his principles available in this country, Man's Supreme Inheritance, Constructive Conscious Control of the Individual and Use of the Self, and I have before me another pamphlet which contains an effective complement to Mr. Kilpatrick's own presentation of the educative process.

Mr. Kilpatrick has a great deal to say about the verb "to learn," and Mr. Alexander's pamphlet, called "A New Technique, Employed in acquiring an Improved Use of the Self While Learning and Learning to Do," contains a great deal of important information that Mr. Kilpatrick as an educator ought to know. Mr. Alexander can demonstrate in practice the psycho-physical mechanisms of "wholeness," the practical avenue through which "the whole child " really can be approached. Mr. Kilpatrick arrives at the concept of "the whole child " by theoretical inference. In this difference of approach lies the tremendously wide gap that exits between the kind of professional guessing that passes for knowledge and knowing, which is the only genuine knowledge.

Unfortunately, the world seems slow to accept its knowers.