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mental and basic because it is not only necessary to an intelligent understanding of the educative process in a general way, but it is absolutely essential to the proper understanding of the so-called basic sciences of educational psychology and educational sociology.

There is much biological material to be found in various educational texts as they are now written. Very frequently the points of view presented are not in accord with the facts of biology, physiology, and hygiene. Educational biology treats of the various biological aspects of the child in their relation to the educative process. It does not deal with mental states and processes as such, but rather with the fundamental biological conditions that affect mental growth and development. Educational biology considers the fact that the child is first, last and always a biological organism, as the most important and fundamental fact in the study of the educational process. This is a truism in education. Any influences that affect the growth and development of this organism, either pre-natally or postnatally, affect the behavior, both individual and social, of the organism. The growing recognition of this fact has given rise to a new interest in the subject-matter of educational biology. Students of education are becoming more and more concerned with the problems of heredity and their relation to child culture and mental development; the evolution of man; the growth and development of the nervous system; the function of the central and autonomic nervous systems; the ductless glands and their influence upon health, mentality, and growth; the effect of nutrition upon physical growth, health, and mental development; physical defects; malformations; disease; hygiene; and sex. If the child could receive the best of attention along these lines during the early years of his life, and if his parents took the proper care during the period of prenatality, many of the difficult problems of the teacher would never arise. The problems of crime and delinquency, disease and subnormality, and happiness would be very largely solved. Educational biology supplements the sciences of educational psychology and educational sociology and it is fundamental to the proper understanding and appreciation of these sciences.

32. The Child a Behaving Organism

[JAMES, William, Talks to Teachers, pp. 23-24. New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1899.]

It is impossible to disguise the fact that in the psychology of our own day the emphasis is transferred from the mind's purely rational function [that is, theoretical, abstract thinking], where Plato and Aristotle, and what one may call the whole classic tradition in philosophy had placed it, to the so long neglected practical side. The theory of evolution is mainly responsible for this. Man, we now have reason to believe, has been evolved from infra-human ancestors, in whom pure reason hardly existed, if at all, and whose mind, so far as it can have had any function, would appear to have been an organ for adapting their movements to the impressions received from the environment, so as to escape the better from destruction. Consciousness would thus seem in the first instance to be nothing but a sort of superadded biological perfection,-useless unless it prompted to useful conduct, and inexplicable apart from that consideration.

33. Relation of the Individual Mind to the Social Mind [COOLEY, C. H., Social Organization, p. 3. New York, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1909.]

Mind is an organic whole made up of coöperating individualities, in somewhat the same way that the music of an orchestra is made up of divergent but related sounds. No one would think it necessary or reasonable to divide the music into two kinds, that made by the whole and that of particular instruments, and no more are there two kinds of mind, the social mind and the individual mind. When we study the social mind we merely fix our attention on larger aspects and relations rather than on the narrower ones of ordinary psychology.

34. The Social Mind

[HOBHOUSE, L. T., Social Evolution and Political Theory, pp. 94, 98-99. New York, Columbia University Press, 1911.]

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It is easy . . to understand that though there is no thought except in the mind of an individual thinker, yet the thought of any generation. . . is a social product. But we must go further than this. The sum of thought in existence at any time is something more than any thought that exists in the head of any individual; it is something to which many minds contribute,

and which yet may be for many purposes a real unity. Consider an advanced complex science. No one thinks of the whole of such a science at any moment. Perhaps no one lives who is master of it all. Yet the whole range of truth that the science has elaborated is available for social or individual uses. It is recorded in books. It is, so to say, incorporated in instruments and laboratories, whereby the results worked out by one man for one purpose are available by another man for another purpose. The science is more than the living knowledge of any individual. It is social knowledge or social thought, not in the sense that it exists in the mind of a mystical social unit, nor in the sense that it is the common property of all men, which it certainly is not, but in the sense that it is the product of many minds working in conscious or unconscious coöperation, that it forms a part of the permanent social tradition going constantly to shape the thought and direct the efforts of fresh generations of learners, that, in a word, it has all the permanency and potency which the individual has not.

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As the function of the individual mind is to organize the life of the individual, so the function of the social mind is to organize the life of society, to control the physical environment, and to regulate the relations of members of the community to one another and of the community as a whole to other communities. This function is of course more adequately performed in proportion as the social mind develops. Now the development of mind in general consists partly in increase of width or scope. The developed mind has a wider reach. Its grasp extends further over the future and the past. Its insight in reality probes deeper, and in consequence its practical control of life is greater. Secondly, the development of mind lies in increased clearness, articulateness, connectedness of perception and of thought. It takes a more penetrating and concrete view. Lastly, and this has special application to the social mind, the more developed mind is more completely and consciously a unity. In the case of the individual, indeed, a unity may always be predicated by another person, even if it be not conscious. An animal or a child may, for all we know, have no thought of yesterday or to-morrow, but we onlookers are aware that it is one and the same being throughout. In the case of the social mind, on the other hand, the consciousness of unity profoundly affects the unity itself. One is tempted to say that it actually brings it to birth. This, however, would not be true in all cases, for the minds of men who are brought into contact affect one

another, and may give to any society a certain oneness, marking it out from others, without perhaps any consciousness of the relation. Moreover, when a new and wider unity is recognized, it is recognized as something already existing, as a relation which was present and was operative somehow while yet unknown. But however this be, any developed unity in the social mind rests on a consciousness, first of some special relation of each constituting it to his fellow members, and secondly of the group, society, institution itself as a whole.

35. Social Psychology as a Basis of Educational Methods [JUDD, Charles H., "Psychology as a Basis of Educational Methods," Elementary School Journal, Vol. 25, pp. 102–112, October, 1924.]

It is a general requirement in all teacher-training institutions that somewhere in the curriculum the student shall take a course in psychology. The content of this course differs widely in different institutions, ranging from a descriptive account of infant behavior to the most abstract review of a metaphysics of the mind. During recent years a great deal of emphasis has been laid on certain statistical inquiries, intelligence tests, and the distinctions between children of large and small intellectual endowments.

In the midst of all of the variety which appears in these courses in psychology for teachers, there is one characteristic which is conspicuously common to all: they all center around the individual. Even where general tests are applied to a group of pupils, the results are always formulated in such a way as to concentrate attention on the powers, inherited or acquired, of the individual. It is the individual's instincts and the individual's learning curve and the individual's rank in reading and arithmetic that are set forth as the psychological facts which the teacher must understand and accept as guides in directing school practice.

The products of collective mental activity, such as language and social customs, get scant recognition in the books on educational psychology. If one looks in the indexes for the number of pages devoted to language and contrasts what is found with the attention given to instinct, one will be impressed with the fact that the intellectual achievements of the group are almost wholly ignored. . . .

When we consider the extent to which the school is concerned with the induction of pupils into the use of language, the curt

treatment given to this topic in the textbooks on educational psychology can hardly be understood.

The explanation is to be found in part in the fact that the great leader of American psychology, William James, was not interested in the psychology of language, and the lesser writers of the younger generation have all imitated him in his emphasis on individual human and animal mental traits and in his disregard for the processes by which the race has accumulated intellectual capital.

The consequences of this failure to impress those who guide the education of children with the importance of group thinking and group action are clearly seen in certain tendencies which have of late become very conspicuous. Everywhere we find writers on education calling on the schools to pay greater attention to individual differences. The curriculum is to be reconstructed; the organization of classes is to be modified or abandoned; the natural impulses of children are to be accepted as guides in discipline; and everywhere the school is to give up its insistence on conformity to group demands in favor of individual tendencies.

It is little wonder that teachers-in-training and those who are experienced in the handling of pupils find themselves bewildered in their efforts to organize their school work on the basis of the kind of psychology which is thus dispensed to them. The student in the normal school learns long descriptions of instincts and finds himself little prepared by what he has been taught to teach pupils how to spell or multiply. The practical teacher is not a little confused to know what instinctive tendencies are satisfied by the exercises in the school subjects for which the board of education seems to have employed him; so he lays his psychology aside and goes about his daily tasks with the vague feeling, or even a pronounced conviction, that there is something in school work which transcends the theory that he learned in his normal-school course.

The fact is that educational psychology is radically deficient. It is in need of revision. It must be made to include a whole series of new chapters. There must be a chapter on the nature of language, one on the nature of the number idea, one on the nature of social customs, such as punctuality and politeness, one on the economic system, and additional chapters dealing with the other social facts which go to make up modern civilization. These chapters will set forth the fact that men have produced, through the coöperation of their minds, certain intellectual

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