training, and where it shall end as the pupil passes into the upper grades and high school.

Does not the failure to teach arithmetic adequately and the lack of agreement as to its place in the scheme of education make it evident that our analysis of this subject has not been carried far enough? We have had two decades of measurement of results in education. We have held pupils and teachers responsible for the deplorable results revealed by tests. Is it not time that we ask some of the fundamental questions about the relation of the individual to social demands? Is it not proper to urge as an important phase of the movement toward the reorganization of the curriculum that the aims of education be defined in terms of the kind of knowledge which we are to cultivate? If what we need is training in the use of number and that alone, we shall proceed in one fashion. If what we aim to cultivate is knowledge of the inner structure of the number system, then we shall proceed in another fashion.

Our three examples of the learning process-the first, the learning of machine technique; the second, the learning of the alphabet; and the third, the learning of the number system -are not by any means the most striking examples which might have been chosen to confirm our plea for social psychology as a basis for educational discussions. We might have plunged at once into such complex problems as those connected with the teaching of literature and national ideals. We might have asked how the individual is to be prepared for his place in the economic scheme of modern industrial and commercial life. We might have asked how the school is to train pupils in honesty and the other moral virtues. Such questions would perhaps have called attention more vividly than do the cases discussed to the necessity of fitting individual traits to social demands. The evidence which these undiscussed examples suggest in support of the main thesis of this series of articles will not be lost because of our treatment of machines and the alphabet and number as illustrations of social coöperation.

One warning may perhaps not be out of place. In arguing for the recognition of the psychology of social institutions, it is by no means denied that there is a psychology of individual mental life. What is said is that individual psychology should be studied as a part of the more inclusive science of the psychology of mankind. It is not denied for a moment that the individual has eyes and ears and hands. It is pointed out, however, that the things at which children look, the sounds to

which they listen, and the objects which they handle are determined not by individual impulse but primarily by the demands of the social group in the midst of which the individual moves and has his social contacts.

What teachers-in-training and teachers-in-service need is not more descriptions of retinas and hypothetical neurones in the individual cerebrum but more emphasis on social institutions and the relation between these and personalities which are developing away from instinctive forms of behavior toward social conformity.

4. Abstract Thinking

The highest type of learning involves the abstracting of general principles of procedure from concrete experiences. The reactions of the organism are modified by the past experiences and their bearing upon the present situation. Other things equal, the individual who is able to generalize his experiences and use them in new situations, involving some relation with the first, will accomplish more than the individual whose mind is single tracked. That is to say, the acquisition of adaptive controls represents a higher type of learning than mere acquisition of specific controls.

5. The Laws of Habit Formation

[THORNDIKE, E. L., Education, pp. 95-97. Copyright, 1912, by the Macmillan Co.] (Adapted.)

The laws of habit formation that are so frequently associated with the names of Bain and James have been supplemented and expressed in a different manner by Thorndike. All of the changes in man's thoughts, feelings and actions happen as a result of certain fundamental laws. The first is the Law of Exercise, that, other things being equal, use strengthens and disuse weakens bonds. That is, the more often a response is made in connection with a certain situation, the more likely it is to be made to that situation thereafter. A practical precept in this connection may be stated thus: "Put together what should go together and keep apart what should not go together." The Law of Effect is that, other things being equal, connections accompanied or followed by satisfying states of affairs are strengthened, whereas

connections accompanied or followed by annoying states of affairs are weakened. It is this law that gives the explanation of the great variation in the ease of learning matters, which so far as the amount and complexity go, would be equally easy to learn. This is the fundamental law of learning and teaching. A practical precept based upon it, is: "Reward good impulses." The Law of Readiness is stated as follows by Thorndike: (1) "That when a conduction unit is ready to conduct, conduction by it is satisfying, nothing being done to alter its action, (2) that for a conduction unit. ready to conduct not to conduct is annoying, and provokes whatever responses nature provides in connection with that particular annoying lack; (3) that when a conduction unit unready for conduction is forced to conduct, conduction by it is annoying." (Thorndike, E. L., Educational Psychology, Briefer Course, p. 55.) The Law of Selective Activity is that of any total situation, some one part may be, and commonly is, predominant in arousing response. For example, out of the babe's total surroundings, the moving brightness of a toy or the face of the mother, provokes attention to the relative exclusion of other elements of the situation. Thorndike calls this the Law of Partial Activity. It can be stated best in his own words: "One part or element or feature of a situation may be prepotent. The response will then be that which is connected by original nature or by the laws of exercise and effect, with that part or element or feature." This means that connections may be with elements of a situation as well as with the situation as a whole. The Law of Analysis, like the Law of Partial Activity, is a law of selective activity. It is that "When any response has been connected with many different situations, alike in the presence of one element and different in other respects, so that when that element appears even in a very different total situation, it will tend to evoke that response." By the operation of this law, we are able to form habits of response that are never experienced by themselves alone.

From a study of these laws and their implications, it is evident that the process of forming connections in thought, feeling, and conduct is very complex. Man's learning in

volves a very complex arrangement of tendencies within tendencies and a hierarchy of habits.

Furthermore, as a result of the laws of Analysis and Partial Activity, any one total situation may be reacted to in many and diverse ways.

6. Are Many Simultaneous Learnings Possible? [KILPATRICK, W. H., "Dangers and Difficulties of the Project Method and How to Overcome Them," Teachers College Record, September, 1921, Vol. 22, pp. 283-321.] (Adapted.)

In considering educational outcomes the usual view has been in the case of any one activity to fix almost exclusive attention upon one primary outcome, the knowledge or skill immediately sought, for instance, a given list of spelling words, a given lesson in grammar, or a given event in history. It has been assumed that one thing and one only can be learned at a time; that the proper business of the school was to fix such a list of things in a desirable order and to see that they were learned. Children have usually been promoted or not according as they have or have not learned the quota prescribed for the term or year; and teachers are often judged upon the success of their classes in this respect. The advocates of the point of view here under consideration challenge the assumption that one thing and only one can be learned at a time. They believe contrariwise that no child can learn just one thing at once. Whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, a child learning the multiplication combinations is also at the same time learning something about dawdling or not dawdling. The way he studies his multiplication fixes or tends to fix him somewhere on the dawdlingalert-manner-of-learning scale; and his position on this scale is sometimes just as important as the thing which he and the teacher, both with a curious narrowness of vision, thought he was learning singly and alone. There are, moreover, many other scales on which he is simultaneously registering himself: the scale of liking or disliking arithmetic; the scale of liking or disliking school and teacher (how many of our children leave school as soon as the law allows?); the scale of self-respect; the scale of a just or unjust estimate of one's powers; the scale of believing that it does or does not pay to try; the scale of believing that books and schools have nothing or something to do with life as I and my family know it and believe in it; the scale of believing that I have succeeded in the degree

that I have "put it over" the teacher; the scale of believing that teachers, principals and the whole tribe of law-givers and law-enforcers wherever found do or do not represent a tyrannical effort to suppress real living. There are, to be sure, many questions regarding these various scales and the transfer of the attitudes so built to other situations. But who can question that there are many such learnings going on in each child all the time, and that the sum of concomitant, incidental, or byproduct learnings may and often does vastly overshadow the specific school learnings, and may in the end determine whether the child shall continue his school learning or even value and use what he has been taught.

7. Learning Involves Many Elements and Outcomes [KILPATRICK, W. H., "Method and the Curriculum," Journal of Educa tional Method, April, 1922, Vol. I, p. 213.]

Learning does not, as a rule, best go on with logically simple elements. Being logical elements they are likely to be devoid of the connectedness that on the one hand call forth interest and endeavor, on the other make for those further connections that constitute true learning. More lifelike elements are demonstrably superior. . . . A second difficulty facing the older learning analysis is that learning is never single. Many learnings of necessity go on simultaneously. No child assigned to a task learns, well or ill, just that one task. . .

8. Activity Leading to Further Activity

[COLVIN, S. S., The Learning Process, pp. 52-53. Copyright, 1911, by the Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission.]

The human being has an environment of tremendous complexity to which he must adjust himself, and he never can acquire all the adjustments necessary and bring them under automatic control. If his life is reduced largely to habit, it means that he has arbitrarily limited the environment to which he is to react, and therefore has shut out the possibility of further development. He has become, as James expresses it, an "old fogy." In this sense habit deadens and reduces the life of the individual to the level of non-voluntary activity. These considerations do not mean that the individual should not acquire a large number of habits. . . . The difference between the person who continues to make progress all through his life, and the one whose real life is ended in his early manhood is that the