The question will naturally be asked, "Should the pupil, then, never receive assistance from any one? Will not this denial result in discouragement and consequent failure?" To this, the answer is that the teacher is set for the guidance and assistance of every pupil; he is the "guide, coöperator, and remover of obstructions." The pupil who needs more assistance than he can get in the recitation time should seek the teacher personally, and should be encouraged to do so at proper times and within proper limits; though some teachers go to the extreme of weakening pupils by too much coddling. The wisdom of the competent teacher will be nowhere more manifest than in his management of this very matter, the skillful direction and shaping of his suggestive assistance to individual students who may think themselves in need.

APPLICATION 4.—The recitation is for the sole benefit of the members of the class, and each member should be allowed to reap the benefit. The pupil, not the teacher, should do the reciting.

The "lecture system," handed down to us from the pedagogical darkness of the Middle Ages, would seem to be a violation of all the laws of mind when applied to any except adult students of already tolerably well-trained minds. With young pupils, the sustained and continuous lecture is an impossible plan; but many teachers substitute for it a more informal and less thoroughly wroughtout monologue, which is scarcely less objectionable. They are so impatient of the pupils' slow and bungling effort at expression, and sometimes so full of newly acquired knowledge themselves, that they lack the virtue of mental continence, and do, themselves, the reciting which is the pupil's right as well as duty. This loquacious habit, which is the curse of so many classrooms, is almost incurable when once formed; the young teacher,

therefore, should guard against forming it "as he would guard against the plague," for it defrauds the pupil of his very birthright. The pupil who knows that the teacher will relieve him from all necessity for organizing his subject-matter to the end of sustained expression, and let him off with mere signals of assent, has little motive for either the preparation or the expression; and without these his time is mainly lost.

When the Teacher Should Talk.-There is a time when the teacher should talk, by way of supplementing or verifying the work of the class; but that is only when the resources of the class have been honestly exhausted. And even then, the help should proceed largely by way of suggestive but concise interrogation. The art of questioning is a great art, but not so easily acquired as the habit of inundating the class with talk. The familiar maxim, "Never tell a child anything which you can lead him to find out for himself," may be too sweeping in its terms; but it is right in its underlying principle, "The mind develops only through its own activity." Two things, therefore, are of vital importance in the teacher, namely, skill in questioning and patience to wait for the pupil's slow and feeble thought to crystallize into expression. The "talkee-talkee" teacher attains to neither of these virtues and, therefore, to no reasonable degree of successful result. It would not be unfair, in most cases, to measure the power and value of a teacher by the inverse proportion of his verbal output to that of the class in hand.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE LAW OF DEVELOPMENT

Principle V.-The unfolding of the mental powers proceeds in a definite, natural order from infancy to maturity. This order and sequence the educator must apprehend and observe in order to accomplish his ends.

This principle, like the law of self-activity, is capable of application on different planes with equal truth. (1) To the development of the several faculties. Sensation and perception come first. We must perceive before we can reproduce, and reproduce before we can imagine. Presentation and representation must both be in full play as the condition of conception. Judgment presupposes concepts; reasoning presupposes judgments, and deductive reasoning is not possible till induction has furnished its generalizations. "Every new movement of mind presupposes all the prior movements and carries them with it"-in it, we might say.

None of these activities, however, can rise high in its development without the supervening of those which come logically later. As we have seen, judgment enters into perception even, and all the powers are inter-related. It would be a serious error, therefore, to attempt to push the training of the perceptive faculty far to the exclusion of the succeeding activities Nevertheless, there is a blossoming time, a period of special and new-born activity,

coming on in due and natural succession, for each of these so-called faculties; and the teacher must take cognizance of these epochs both as to the content and method of his teaching.

(2) To the order in which the branches of knowledge shall be taken up, and to the arrangement of the subject matter within those studies. Here we have two aspects, (a) the psychological, which takes cognizance of the laws of mind and the child's present stage of development, and (b) the logical, which is concerned with the logical dependence and order of segments of knowledge, as of algebra to arithmetic, of medieval to ancient history, or, more specifically, of the later theorems in geometry to the earlier ones. It is by the correct application of our principle in these two lines that courses of study are properly constructed, the imperfections of our present courses, whatever they may be, being chiefly due to our imperfect knowledge of the child and the deep-lying laws of his normal development. Thus it is that Dr. Dewey and so many others are deeply dissatisfied with existing educational procedure. The reader is advised to read carefully and critically Dewey's "School and Society," in order to a fuller understanding of the principle under discussion.

(3) The principle of development has relevance also to the presentation of what might be called the individual items of knowledge, as in the teaching of specific topics, or single lessons, in any field of knowledge. In this connection, certain familiar and generally accepted pedagogical maxims will be considered later on.

It may be said here that the term maxim is used in this book as meaning a practical rule for applying a principle. Principles, when formulated, state what is true. Maxims tell us what to do in conformity with principles.

APPLICATION 1.-All educational means and measures should harmonize with this natural order of development. All teaching should be adapted to the capability and condition of the taught, both in matter and method.

It is a blind and astonishing neglect of this truth which characterizes the education of the Middle Ages, a neglect which, by the way, practically reaches down to the eighteenth century in its relation to childhood and early youth. In fact, until the days of Comenius and Rousseau, no real education was ever proposed for childrennothing more than practical training for the social relations of the family and the community. And in this, civilized Europe had made little advance upon the training of barbarous tribes. Children were not thought to be capable of intellectual education; and, indeed, they were not capable of profiting by such education as had then been devised, whether in the subtleties of Scholasticism or the classical training of the Renaissance.

Periods of Development.—This would seem to be the proper place for a brief setting forth of some attempts at a division of the school period of life into periods, or zones, of development. No precise or sharply defined limits can be set to these periods, but they may be recognized as five in number, namely, (1) The Period of Infancy, extending from birth to perhaps the end of the fourth year. In this stage, the muscular coordinations are comparatively few and imperfect, though, of course, constantly increasing in number and perfectness. The mental experiences of this stage are vague and elementary, as we have seen in Chapter V. During these years, the child learns to walk and talk; but the period, even to its close, is marked by helplessness and physical incompetency. It is a sort of vegetative period, in which the mind is largely passive and receptive, quickly responsive