tion, or you may look for a street car, or you may watch where the crowd goes and decide to follow it. . . . We usually carry our analysis only as far as is necessary for practical purposes. Hence we are quite familiar with many complex situations or objects, and know just how to behave toward them, although we have never analyzed them into their smallest elements. Similarly, children learn to recognize, name, and use such complex objects as doors, windows, chairs, wagons, automobiles, etc., without first being taught that these have acute or obtuse angles or consist of circles, rectangles, squares, cylinders, or what not. . . . Thus we see that great modern psychologists, such as William James, describe learning not in terms of proceeding from the simple to the complex, but in terms of the learner's meeting more or less complex objects or situations and analyzing these as far as may be necessary for practical behavior. This account of the learning process is having large influence in changing the organization of subject-matter. For example, since children can easily recognize as wholes such statements as "We have two pets" or "They are white mice," such short sentences may be used in beginning reading, instead of beginning with letters or syllables. . . . Similarly in handwriting, the children write whole words or phrases before they are drilled in making meaningless straight lines and curved lines. 48. Symbolism Satirized [THORNDIKE, E. L., Notes on Child Study, pp. 76-77. New York, Columbia University Press, 1901.] Thorndike satirizes Froebel's views regarding the use of common things as symbols of abstractions in the following paragraphs: And what shall I say of those who by a most extraordinary intellectual perversity attribute to children the habit of using common things as symbols of abstractions which have never in any way entered their heads; who tell us that the girl likes to play with her doll because the play symbolizes to her motherhood; that the boy likes to be out of doors because the sunlight symbolizes to him cheerfulness? . . . If we live in houses because they symbolize protection, if we like to see Sherlock Holmes on the stage because he symbolizes to us craft, or Uncle Tom because he symbolizes to us slavery, or a clown from the circus because he symbolizes to us folly; if we eat apples because they symbolize to us the fall of man, or strawberries because they symbolize to us the scarlet woman, then perhaps the children play with the ball because it symbolizes "infinite development and absolute limitation." No one has ever given a particle of valid evidence to show any such preposterous associations in children's minds between plain things and these far-away abstractions. 49. Difficulties Involved in General Rules-Simple Rules Desirable [THORNDIKE, E. L., Principles of Teaching, pp. 186-187. New York, A. G. Seiler, 1916, and JAMES, William, Talks to Teachers, pp. 141143. New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1900.] Avoid making rules involving distinctions which the pupils cannot make. 'No communication between pupils without especial permission except in the five minutes recesses between periods,' a ten-year old can understand; the distinction between a period and the five minutes recess is easy. But 'No communication between pupils that disturbs the work of the class' will be beyond him. Mr. A. C. Benson relates that a boy who was rebuked for putting a dormouse down the neck of a very easygoing master, asked in all good faith, 'But how was I to know that he drew the line at a dormouse?' Rules which vary in complex ways with attendant circumstances or with the motive for the act are unsuitable for young children and for the duller older children. Moral as well as intellectual progress should be made step by step along clear pathways. Feelings of Meaning.-[James has shown that although learners had apparently forgotten a memorized poem after the lapse of some time, the fact that they relearned it more easily proved that some considerable effect of the first learning had persisted. Hence, says James:] "In short, Professor Ebbinghaus's experiments show that things which we are quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless impressed themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. We are different for having once learned them. The resistances in our systems of brain-paths are altered. Our apprehensions are quickened. Our conclusions from certain premises are probably not just what they would be if those modifications were not there. . . "The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. We are all too apt to measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in directly reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters as they may have learned; and inarticulate power in them is something of which we always underestimate the value. The boy who tells us "I know the answer, but I can't say what it is," we treat as practically identical with him who knows absolutely nothing about the answer at all. But this is a great mistake. It is but a small part of our experience in life that we are ever able articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our tendencies to judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having once had to do with it, of its neighborhood and of where we may go to recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of their education. . . . Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output consequently more important. 50. Sensory-Motor Experiences [HALL, G. Stanley, Adolescence, Vol. I, p. 172. New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1908.] Of all work-schools, a good farm is probably the best for motor development. This is due to its great variety of occupations, healthful conditions, and the incalculable phyletic reinforcement from immemorial times. I have computed some threescore industries, as the census now classifies them, that were more or less generally known and practised sixty years ago in a little township which not only in this but in other respects has many features of an ideal educational environment for adolescent boys, combining as it does not only physical and industrial, but civil and religious elements in wise proportions and with pedagogic objectivity, and representing the ideal of such a state of intelligent citizen voters as was contemplated by the framers of the Constitution. 51. Motor Activities in the Home [BOLTON, F. E., Principles of Education, pp. 575-576. Charles Scribner's Sons, 1910.] New York, Every girl and every boy should have definite home duties demanding muscular exercise and skill. The boy can mow the lawn, split the wood and carry it in, tend the furnace, make boxes and shelves, mend the fences, run errands, wash dishes, sweep, dust, make beds, etc. His sister should be equally interested in gardening, dishwashing, and in addition should be able to cook a meal, cut and fit a garment, or saw a board and drive a nail without danger to her fingers or to bystanders. Every home should have its garden and its tool-chest. Both boy and girl should have an intelligent interest in them derived through active acquaintance. "Into the education of the great majority of children there enters as an important part their contributions to the daily labor of the household and the farm, or, at least, of the household. It is one of the serious consequences of the rapid concentration of population into cities and large towns, and of the minute division of labor, which characterizes modern industries, that this wholesome part of education is less easily secured than it used to be when the greater part of the population was engaged in agriculture. Organized education must, therefore, supply in urban communities a good part of the manual and moral training which the coöperation of children in the work of father and mother affords in agricultural communities. Hence the great importance in any urban population of facilities for training children to accurate hand-work, and for teaching them patience, forethought, and good judgment in productive labor" (Eliot, Educational Reform, p. 405). 52. Motor Expression [JAMES, William, Talks to Teachers, pp. 26-27, 33-34. Henry Holt & Co., 1915.] New York, The brain, so far as we understand it, is given us for practical behavior. Every current that runs into it from skin or eye or ear runs out again into muscles, glands, or viscera, and helps to adapt the animal to the environment from which the current came. It therefore generalizes and simplifies our view to treat the brain life and the mental life as having one fundamental kind of purpose. . . . The 'unessential, unpractical' activities are themselves far more connected with our behavior and our adaptation to the environment than at first sight might ap pear. No truth, however abstract, is ever perceived, that will not probably at some time influence our earthly action. You must remember that, when I talk of action here, I mean action in the widest sense. I mean speech, I mean writing, I mean yeses and noes, and tendencies 'from' things and tendencies 'toward' things, and emotional determinations; and I mean them in the future as well as in the immediate present. As I talk here, and you listen, it might seem as if no action followed. You might call it a purely theoretic process, with no practical result. But it must have a practical result. It cannot take place at all and have your conduct unaffected. If not to-day, then on some far future day you will answer some question differently by reason of what you are thinking now. Some of you will be led by my words into new veins of inquiry, into reading special books. These will develop your opinion, whether for or against. That opinion will in turn be expressed, will receive criticism from others in your environment, and will affect your standing in their eyes. We cannot escape our destiny, which is practical; and even our most theoretic faculties contribute to its working out. . . . [James says concerning the necessity for reactions]: If all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in the class room. No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative expression,-this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to forget. An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind it in the way of capacity acquired. Even as a mere impression, it fails to produce its proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain fully among the acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole cycle of our operations. Its motor consequences are what clinch it. Some effect due to it in the way of activity must return to the mind in the form of the sensation of having acted, and connect itself with the impression. The most durable impressions are those on account of which we speak or act, or else are inwardly convulsed. The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them parrot-like in the school room, rested on the truth that a thing merely read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest possible adhesion in the mind. |