A survey of the educational system of the Philippine islands by the Board of educational survey, created under acts 3162 and 3196 of the Philippine Legislature.

ELEMENTARY EDUCATION

307

RESEARCH BY SUPERVISORS.-One outstanding feature of the work
of supervisors merits particularly commendatory comment. This is the
widespread interest and activity in the use of the newer methods of
investigation of school conditions, of standard and especially devised
methods of testing and measuring pupil and teacher efficiency, and of
graphic representation of results of instruction. The larger number of
supervisors who came under the observation of the Survey Commission
were carrying on such investigations. Through the recent creation of a
position which gives particular attention to it, this type of work has
received an impetus from the central office. It is an outgrowth of the
sort of training that has been given in recent years to students of education in the Philippines and in America; it is the result in certain provinces
of the lively interest of division superintendents in modern educational
methods; and much of it is traceable directly to the fact that supervisors,
sometimes with but little stimulation from superiors, are keeping in touch
through reading with the development of scientific method in education
and are carrying over into practice the methods with which they become
acquainted.
This admirable work needs guidance and safeguarding. American
public schools have suffered from enthusiasm which outran technical
preparedness for scientific investigation of school conditions. Students
of education, teachers, supervisors, and administrators have carried on
work of this sort which they were not properly qualified to undertake.
Diagnosis has all too often become an end in itself to the neglect of remedial treatment. Futile counting, computing, and figure manipulation,
followed by unwarranted interpretations and unjustifiable conclusions,
have given an illusion of progressive and scientific procedure to utterly
useless activities which took time that should have been devoted to less
showy but more effective work. Whole groups of schools have been
upset for long periods by investigations and experiments carried on by
incompetent persons.
A check of some effectiveness has been operative in the United States
through the number of publications devoting themselves to reporting
new developments in the field of education. One who undertakes a
project almost always has the intention of publishing an account of his
procedure and results. He knows that his work will be subjected to the
merciless criticism of others engaged in similar work, and he is guided
by the known rules of scientific procedure; or if he is not so guided, his
error is certain to be exposed. Even so, the waste of effort and the
disturbance of school work is enormous.
This check, insofar as it is effective, would be furnished in the Islands
by the same agency that has already been urged in other connections,
a clearing house probably in the form of a monthly publication, for