A survey of the literature published during the last ten years dealing with education and the educational problems in America,… cannot fail to impress even the most casual that antagonists and protagonists fall into three roughly classified camps: at one extreme the culturalists, at the other the vocationalists, and between and exposed to the ceaseless fire of both the bewildered parents, who are concerned with the problem primarily as it touches the education of their own children, and who, confused by the amount of ammunition expended by the opposing forces, have been compelled to draw the small solace possible from an ancient stalemate, that “Much may be said for both sides,” and have blindly trusted precedent with an historical faith in the traditional good lying somewhere in the thing called “education.” The tide of battle has ebbed and flowed, the advantage of ammunition and popular support being now with one, now with the other; and the plight of the bewildered yet vitally concerned non-combatant has remained virtually the same.

Pavlov’s data on the two fundamental antagonistic nervous processes—stimulation and inhibition—and his profound generalizations regarding them, in particular, that these processes are parts of a united whole, that they are in a state of constant conflict and constant transition of the one to the other, and his views on the dominant role they play in the formation of the higher nervous activity—all those belong to the most established natural—scientific validation of the Marxist dialectal method. They are in complete accord with the Leninist concepts on the role of the struggle between opposites in the evolution, the motion of matter.