and social institutions which are no less real than the objects of the physical world in which we live. These institutions control human life in the highest degree. They have to be accepted by human beings as enormously more important than instinctive tendencies. In fact, the chief reason why men succeed in living together in a productive way is that they do not live by their instincts but under the guidance of far-sighted plans of cooperation. Any system of psychology is wholly inadequate as a basis for school practice which overlooks the fact that we live in an environment made up primarily of social institutions rather than of natural objects to which our instincts respond.

Furthermore, when one tries to give an adequate psychological definition of the school, one has to describe it as a place where children are sent to substitute for their instinctive impulses habits which are gradually developed in conformity with social institutions. There is no need of a school to teach children how to swallow. Nature has provided everyone with a well-organized motor mechanism of the instinctive type which takes care of all of the swallowing that the individual will ever have to do. The school does not have to teach children how to smile or how to frown. It does not have to teach them how to protect the eyes by winking or how to use their hands in grasping. These are instinctive acts. The school, however, has to give guidance in the appropriate use of these instincts in order that the right objects shall be grasped and in order that smiling shall have the proper relation to good social taste. The school has to supplement natural impulses. Nature does not equip us with the English language or with the power to drive a pencil purposefully across blank paper or with a scheme for counting. The multiplication table is as far removed from instinct as human life is removed from life in an ant-hill or a beehive.

If the school is to perform efficiently its task of raising humanbehavior to a level higher than that at which the animals live, it will be necessary for educational psychology to include accounts of the higher forms of activity and to show clearly the steps by which children are to be raised from the forms of behavior for which personal inheritance has prepared them to those which are demanded in human social life. Let us consider several examples. from the sphere of manual dexterity. every child when given a pencil or a piece of crayon is to close all of the fingers on it and grasp it in the palm of the hand. Furthermore, his natural tendency is to draw lines in irregular

The first may be taken
The natural tendency of

patterns on the paper or blackboard without trying to make any definite or regular figures. The school, starting at this natural level, aims to direct the child's muscular contractions in such a way as to lead them to conform to models which the race has worked out through centuries of endeavor. The school patiently drills in the laborious task of holding a pencil, and later a pen, in three fingers and skilfully guiding the points of these instruments with rapidity and with a freedom from distraction which makes it possible to carry on during the performance an elaborate train of thought only remotely related to the pencil or pen and to the black lines which are produced.

What effect does school drill have on the individual's natural tendencies toward instinctive grasping? Any one can see the answer to this question if he will observe early lessons in handwriting. When the little child is called on to cultivate a new and higher mode of behavior, his nervous system is excited in all of its parts. The child's feet and facial muscles are set in motion along with the hand which is being trained to take on a new and most complex form of action. The psychologist describes the child's condition as one of nervous and motor diffusion. The diffusion of stimulations throughout the whole organism is the only possible way in which nature can begin at the bottom and build up a wholly new type of coordination different from the natural form of behavior with which inheritance endowed the child. Diffusion is the first stage in the acquisition of a new combination of muscular contractions to be guided by social demands.

The school is interested in the natural modes of behavior of the hands and fingers because it has to overcome these in developing penmanship, but it is very much more concerned with the stages through which the child must pass in ascending from diffusion to fluent coördination in writing. It has to study the letters with great care in order to discover the forms permitting the highest degree of fluency. It has to know the rate at which the child can leave diffusion behind and acquire fluency. It has to find out whether it is better to stress the demand for rapid movements early in the process or to seek in the first stages of instruction regularity of outline in the letters. produced and postpone the cultivation of speed to a later stage. The whole series of statements which have been made about handwriting can be condensed into a single formula. It is the business of the school in teaching handwriting to transform the

child from a purely instinctive animal into a being capable of using a highly developed art which the race has evolved.

At the risk of too frequent repetition, it may be said again that handwriting is not an instinct; it is not natural for the individual; it is not a form of behavior which the individual invents or could invent; it is not a form of movement which can be acquired without drill. Handwriting can be perfected only through the exercise of the greatest concentration of attention on the part of the individual and through expert guidance from some one who has carefully studied the process by which the elaborate forms of dexterity are produced.

There are other types of training which the school provides in order to develop the pupil from a purely natural state into a state of civilized coöperation. Let us consider the way in which education has slowly brought the race from its original vague general thinking about quantity to the exact types of thought which are constantly employed in modern business and modern science. Let us go back in imagination to the period in the history of the race when there were no weights and measures and no number system. When men traded with one another in those primitive times, they arranged their barter as best they could by inspecting the commodities which were to be exchanged and adjusting values in accordance with standards which were wholly indefinite. They took a handful of this or that or a pile of something. Slowly, as social life progressed, it became evident that justice to both parties in a transaction of exchange demands exactness and standardization. The slow process of evolving precise thinking began.

Something of the difficulty of evolving standards of measuring and counting will be realized when we recall the diversity of measures in different parts of the world even in modern times. Still more striking is the evidence which appears in the historical fact that Europe borrowed its method of counting from the Orient and acknowledges its indebtedness even to-day by designating as Arabic the numerals which it uses most commonly in commerce and ordinary life.

The task of evolving standards, measures, and a perfect system of enumeration has been accomplished. The task of inducting each child into the proper understanding and use of these instruments of civilized thinking is an ever new and ever difficult matter. The child is not by nature exact in his thought or given to the weighing and measuring of things. Society has had to set apart some of its most intelligent members and has

charged them with the duty of seeing to it that children are taught to use measures and numerals. The resistant tendencies exhibited by children who become confused in the midst of the complex systems devised by society must be sympathetically overcome; the intricacies of our civilized life must be spread out in an order and form which will make it reasonably easy for the child's mind to see the plan. All of this must be done with due regard to individual differences in mental agility but with a firm insistence that the methods of society will have to be accepted by every individual.

It is little wonder, when one includes the complex psychology of society in his thinking, that arithmetic is one of the greatest stumbling blocks in our educational system. Arithmetic is not the expression of an instinct. Thinking in numbers is not impulsive; it is not something which children invent spontaneously and carry to a highly perfected level because of their feeling that they need it to satisfy a craving of their own minds. Arithmetic is one of the most elaborate products of coöperative intellectual effort. Long generations have contributed to the perfection of the system. The Romans had a crude system; the peoples of northern Europe had a still cruder system as late as the sixteenth century. Then from the East there came a form of enumeration which had been up to that time unknown to the merchants and common people of Europe. It was so perfect a plan of counting, so complete a system of expression, that it was adopted by all civilized nations.

It has been suggested from time to time by educational reformers that if pupils are not drilled in the use of Arabic numerals in the lower grades and are allowed to go on untrained in the intricacies of addition and multiplication, they will, by the exercise of their own natural curiosity, gradually come easily and without effort into possession of the principles of mathematics and will be able to show perfection in this highly complex art. Such optimism about children's picking up arithmetic incidentally is based on the most absurd psychology. The psychology of arithmetic is the psychology of a race, not of an individual. The function of the school is not to wait for number to well up spontaneously in the child's mind like some natural expression of an inborn tendency. The function of the school. is to take a child whose thinking is inexact and vague and to persuade that child that living in a civilized society requires a new type of concentration of attention, a new method of expression. The school must not only arouse a demand in the

child's mind for this new type of exact thinking but also supply him with the system by means of which this demand can be satisfied. It must insist that its system and no other be used. If the child begins to use an individual system, such as counting on the fingers, it is the duty of the school to put a stop to this clumsy method of thinking and compel the child to adopt the better system which the race has evolved.

The school is society's agency for transforming children into social beings. Reformers may recommend to the end of time that number be taught incidentally and maintain that penmanship is a strain on the finer muscles and hence should be postponed to an indefinitely later date in the hope that the pupils will pick it up, but the true teacher of children knows that such statements are not in accordance with the real needs of children and of society. Number has to be learned because nature does not give number to the individual as a part of his inherited equipment. In fact, the terms "learning" and "natural endowment" always have been antithetical and always will be. One has to learn just because one is not by nature provided with what one needs for living.

A third illustration which will help to reinforce the contention that education must be based on a study of social psychology is to be found in the modern demand for punctuality. Even the most casual observer of modern civilization cannot fail to be impressed by the fact that coöperative living depends on punctuality. Every time-table bears testimony to the necessity of a time system on which all of the members of society agree. The activities of men and women are often determined years in advance by the calendar and the clock. A very considerable portion of the population of a modern state devotes its energy to keeping the machinery of life moving on time. Think of those who make and sell time-pieces; think of those who send out time signals from observatories; think of the train-starters and the factory time-checkers; think of the boards of arbitration which decide hour-scales for laborers.

After considering the breadth and scope of society's interest in time, one begins to realize why the school objects to tardiness. Yet punctuality is not a product of nature; it is a product of social training. There is nothing spontaneous about the highly developed demand of modern life for strict conformity to the clock in the sense in which an instinct is spontaneous. Promptness is a social virtue.

The interesting fact for the student of educational psychology