In pedagogy also, Locke, and Rousseau, and Herbart, and the many-sided Bentham, based their theories of education upon their conceptions of human nature.  Those conceptions were the same as those which underlay their political theories, and have been affected in the same way by modern knowledge.  For a short time it even looked, as if the lecturers in the English training colleges would make the same separation between the study of human institutions and human nature as has been made in politics.  Lectures on School Method were distinguished during this period from those on the Theory of Education.  The first became mere descriptions and comparisons of the organisation and teaching in the best schools.  The second consisted of expositions, with occasional comment and criticism of such classical writers as Comenius, or Locke, or Rousseau; and were curiously like those informal talks on Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, which, under the name of the Theory of Politics, formed in my time such a pleasant interlude in the Oxford course of Humaner Letters.  But while the Oxford lecture-courses still, I believe, survive almost unchanged, the Training College lectures on the Theory of Education are beginning to show signs of a change as great as that which took place in the training of medical students, when the lecturers on anatomy, instead of expounding the classical authorities, began to give, on their own responsibility, the best account of the facts of human structure of which they were capable.

The reason for this difference is, apparently, the fact that while Oxford lecturers on the Theory of Politics are not often politicians, the Training College lecturers on the Theory of Teaching have always been teachers, to whom the question whether any new knowledge could be made useful in their art was one of living and urgent importance.  One finds accordingly that under the leadership of men like Professors William James, Lloyd Morgan, and Stanley Hall, a progressive science of teaching is being developed, which combines the study of types of school organisation and method with a determined attempt to learn from special experiments, from introspection, and from other sciences, what manner of thing a child is.

Modern pedagogy, based on modern psychology, is already influencing the schools whose teachers are trained for their profession.  Its body of facts is being yearly added to; it has already caused the abandonment of much dreary waste of time; has given many thousands of teachers a new outlook on their work, and has increased the learning and happiness of many tens of thousands of children.