With our own respect for our calling, based upon this incontrovertible principle, will come, sooner or later, increased compensation for the work and increased prestige in the community.  I repeat that these things can only come after we have established a true craft spirit.  If we are ashamed of our calling, if we regret openly and publicly that we are not lawyers or physicians or dentists or bricklayers or farmers or anything rather than teachers, the public will have little respect for the teacher’s calling.  As long as we criticize each other before laymen and make light of each other’s honest efforts, the public will question our professional standing on the ground that we have no organized code of professional ethics,—­a prerequisite for any profession.

I started out to tell you something that we ought to be thankful for,—­something that ought to counteract in a measure the inevitable tendencies toward pessimism and discouragement.  The hopeful thing about our present status is that we have an established principle upon which to work.  A writer in a recent periodical stoutly maintained that education was in the position just now that medicine was in during the Middle Ages.  The statement is hardly fair, either to medicine or to education.  If one were to attempt a parallel, one might say that education stands to-day where medicine stood about the middle of the nineteenth century.  The analogy might be more closely drawn by comparing our present conception of education with the conception of medicine just prior to the application of the experimental method to a solution of its problems.  Education has still a long road to travel before it reaches the point of development that medicine has to-day attained.  It has still to develop principles that are comparable to the doctrine of lymph therapy or to that latest triumph of investigation in the field of medicine,—­the theory of opsonins,—­which almost makes one believe that in a few years violent accident and old age will be the only sources of death in the human race.

Education, we admit, has a long road to travel before it reaches so advanced a point of development.  But there is no immediate cause for pessimism or despair.  We need especially, now that the purpose of education is adequately defined, an adequate doctrine of educational values and a rich and vital infusion of the spirit of experimental science.  For efficiency in the work of instruction and training, we need to know the influence of different types of experience in controlling human conduct,—­we need to know just what degree of efficiency is exerted by our arithmetic and literature, our geography and history, our drawing and manual training, our Latin and Greek, our ethics and psychology.  It is the lack of definite ideas and criteria in these fields that constitutes the greatest single source of waste in our educational system to-day.