1. What Is Learning?

[BAGLEY, W. C., and KEITH, J. A. H., Introduction to Teaching, pp. 2833. New York, Macmillan Co., 1924.] (Adapted.)

Although several large volumes have been written on the psychology of learning (Thorndike, Educational Psychology, Vol. II, The Psychology of Learning; Meumann, Psychology of Learning; Pyle, Psychology of Learning, etc.), one of the best digests of what learning is may be found in Bagley and Keith's Introduction to Teaching.

In order to understand the teaching process, the student must first know something about the learning process. There are several kinds of learning. Some of the different points of view from which learning may be studied will now be considered briefly.

1. Learning means that some change has been produced in one's behavior or conduct. The boy who wishes to throw curved balls must practise and practise. The training has changed his behavior. He has learned what is for him a new habit; he has built up a new control over his muscles. He can do something that he could not do before. Learning produces a change in the way in which the individual acts, thinks, or feels.

2. Learning means the formation of new bonds or neural connections. The way one acts is determined by the neural connections that have been established, and consequently any change in behavior means a corresponding change in neural patterns due to the formation of bonds. This particular conception of learning enables us to imagine the process as it probably goes on in the nervous system. It helps one to appreciate learning from a physiological point of view. There are some important phases of learning that situation-response bonds do not satisfactorily explain. Whether this is due to the inadequacy of our knowledge of physiology of the nervous system, or that the higher mental processes are not and never can be adequately explained in terms of the bond theory, is not known at present.

3. Learning means mental activity. In learning to throw curves, the boy must have ideas, images, perceptions, and so on or else he would be unable to direct his muscles. Underlying his mental activity, however, there are the physiological processes mentioned above. We know little of the physiological processes involved. The mental processes involved may be examined. That they are of great importance is very evident. Indeed, it

is safe to assert that all kinds of learning, at least the higher types in man, involve mental activity.

4. Perhaps the most important step in learning is the formation of clear ideas. Probably one of the most important phases of learning is that involved in the formation of clear ideas. Teaching means stimulating, directing, and encouraging the learner to build up a series of clear ideas that will function. Ideas are but a means to an end; the end is conduct.

5. Improvement in behavior means, as a rule, the forming of clearer ideas through repetition. The teacher must frequently require the pupils to repeat performances until they are well learned. This often means that the ideas must be refined and clarified. There can be no learning without mental activity.

2. The Meaning of Learning

[KILPATRICK, W. H., "Subject Matter and the Educative Process," Journal of Educational Method, February, 1923, Vol. 2, p. 233.] Learning to be complete must serve a two-fold function: first, it must enable the learner to grapple successfully with some present hindering difficulty, and, second, it must in consequence so modify the learner that his subsequent experience is thereby remade. This remaking will take in varying degree the three lines of advance previously noted: new insight into possibilities, new inclinations, correlative, and new powers of achieving. Learning arises in and from experience; it is best tested by its dynamic tendency to reënter and remake subsequent experience.

3. Types of Learning

[JUDD, Charles H., "Types of Learning," Elementary School Journal, November, 1924, Vol. 25, pp. 173-183.]

The first article of this series called attention to the fact that educational psychology concerns itself in general with a discussion of individual traits and capacities while the school concerns itself chiefly with the transformation of the individual so that his reactions shall be not those which his natural impulses dictate but those which are demanded by organized society. A number of examples were briefly discussed in which the individual was shown to be in process of change from a person responding in his own untrained way to the demands of civilization to a person who conforms to convention. The present article will carry the discussion forward by offering an analysis

of the learning process which aims to show that much of the learning which is accomplished in schools is of a type which would be quite impossible without a social background.

A kind of learning which is very common in the experience of every member of a modern community is that which is involved in the use of a machine. One learns to drive an automobile, or to use a sewing machine, or to run a harvesting machine, or to tell time by a watch, or to call up one's friends on the telephone. In each of these cases the use of the mechanical or electrical device may be acquired without the user having any knowledge whatsoever of the internal construction of the thing which he is employing. The machine has parts which have been put together by some one else. The user gets the benefit of the maker's skill but is not called on to go through all of the steps through which the maker went in assembling the machine. The user thus becomes the last of a series of cooperating individuals. His performances with the aid of the machine are not merely the results of his personal abilities and personal skills. By the output of certain very simple units of personal energy the user sets in motion forces which represent long accumulations of thought and skill.

There are instances in which the user is acquainted with the internal construction of his machine. The interesting point to be noted with regard to such cases, however, is that the skilled machinist, when he uses the machine, does not have to stop and think of each wheel and lever that he calls into play. As a user, he can dispense with much of his knowledge and for the purpose of the moment he needs only the skills which are equally at his command and at the command of the person who only uses and does not understand the machine.

We may carry the illustration farther. There are various kinds of knowledge of the internal construction of the machine on the part of those who know more than merely how to use it. There is the kind of knowledge which is possessed by the repair man who, through practical demonstration and contact, knows the parts of the machine and the way in which they act upon one another. More profound by far is the knowledge of the constructing engineer who understands in detail the mechanical principles involved in making the parts and putting them together. Even at this level of what may be called complete understanding, there are differences which are of great importance to the psychologist and the teacher. A knowledge of the mechanical principles embodied in a machine may be

gained through study by one who has no mechanical initiative. Such a student of machinery is shown how wheels and pistons have been fitted together and why they are of the dimensions and forms which they exhibit. The student of machinery who has initiative, on the other hand, not only sees what has been done but also looks beyond the present structures and thinks of other combinations which might be tried. The man with initiative leads; the man without initiative merely follows where others have opened up the way. They are both in possession of highly technical knowledge, but their knowledge is of different types.

The various kinds of mechanical knowledge which have been described in the foregoing paragraph are all products of human coöperation. The truth of this statement is perfectly evident with regard to a user of a machine. The machine had to be put together for him. It is less evident for the constructing engineer; but we have only to think of the facts of history for a moment and it will become manifest that the most highly skilled mechanic is dependent on accumulated social experience. The designer and maker of machines uses materials which the race discovered only after the most arduous experimentation. He begins his thinking with perfected devices, such as the wheel and axle and the lever, which required the span of many generations for their discovery. A single human life would not be long enough to permit the rediscovery of those items of knowledge which are essential to the operations of the constructing engineer. His inventive genius is freed from the necessity of discovering first principles, and his mind can use the products of racial effort in evolving refinements of that which has been given to him by other minds.

The distinctions which have been pointed out between mere users of machinery and designers and constructors can be carried over without elaborate restatement into the world of purely intellectual devices. Every child in modern civilization is taught how to use the alphabet. History tells us how this very useful and intricate device was invented. For a long period the Egyptians made records for their monuments by drawing sketchy outline pictures. They even went so far as to relate these pictures to the words which they used in oral language, and there is some evidence that they used pictures to represent sounds. With all of their genius and experimentation, however, the Egyptians did not arrive at a sound alphabet.

The other great civilization of antiquity, the Chinese civ

ilization, struggled with the same problem. The Chinese made less progress than did the Egyptians, and even to-day they write in symbols which are pictures rather than representations of sounds.

The effort to devise an alphabet had to continue beyond the first ineffective representations of sounds and ideas by means of drawings. It required, as one historian has put the matter, the transplanting of the half-successful Egyptian achievements to a new national soil before the invention of a true alphabet was achieved. Somewhere in Asia Minor human minds took the momentous step of representing sounds by simple outline figures, and a new device was brought into the world. The generations which followed that period of invention needed only to learn the use of the alphabet. There is no necessity of carrying the ordinary child back to the beginnings of things with regard to the alphabet any more than there is a necessity of taking the purchaser of an automobile to the factory and introducing him item by item to the parts of his machine. The user of the alphabet and the driver of an automobile are users, not designers. They will have to give some time to the acquisition of adequate control over these ingenious inventions. There will have to be a period of learning in both cases. The type of learning, however, will be one which takes advantage of a completed mechanism.

We may very properly carry the parallel examples much farther. It is altogether undesirable for the purchaser of an automobile or the learner of the alphabet to attempt at first to enter upon the rôle of the expert mechanic. Any readjustment in either of these highly developed devices calls for the most refined skill. The learner of the alphabet is sure to find that all society is determined that he shall use the letters as they are without departure from convention. The maker of the automobile is likely to cancel his guaranty if he finds his seals broken by the tinkering novice.

It is proper to pause at this point and call attention once more to the utter inadequacy of a psychology of the alphabet which deals only with individual traits. Now and then some enthusiast for individual psychology attempts to tell us what mental processes are involved in spelling. With all of the confidence of one learned in the physiology of the individual nervous system, such an analyst begins by saying that the first step in learning to spell is to receive on one's retina a visual impression. This visual impression, we are further informed, is a chemical