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CHAPTER X

HABIT IN LEARNING

Dewey, one of our leading educational philosophers and social psychologists, has declared that education is a matter of habit. William James had much the same point of view, It is generally believed that the child begins his acquisition of habits at birth (if not before). A generally accepted view is that all acquired behavior rests on instincts. Habit-control and the control exerted by the other outcomes of learning, gradually replace instinctive control.

The laws of habit formation are readiness, exercise, and effect (4). The rules to be observed when forming habits are admirably presented in the quotation (9) from James, who borrowed from Bain.

The principles underlying technique in habit formation. (11), adapted from Bagley and Keith's An Introduction to Teaching, should be observed by all teachers where habit formation is the goal.

Habits play an important part in human life by (1) making action more accurate and effective; (2) reducing attention necessary to successful execution of movement to a minimum; (3) by reducing fatigue. The teacher is able to secure motive for the formation of habit by making either an instinctive or rational appeal. She can direct the pupil's attention to the essentials of the process if she uses concrete demonstrations and draws from the child's past experiences. As children cannot give attention to any task for a long period of time, the teacher needs (1) to limit the time for practice; (2) make appeal to emulation, and (3) vary the procedure.

The teacher must not expect the pupils to do equally well in all cases of habit formation. The relative difficulty of the task varies, the attitude of the individual toward the task may be unfavorable, or a feeling of confidence may be

wanting. Moreover, the bodily tone of every individual differs from time to time and progress of the pupil is necessarily affected.

1. Acquired Behavior Rests in Instinct, but Must
Be Acquired

[ANGELL, J. R., Introduction to Psychology, p. 12. New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1918.]

The acquired forms of behavior rest upon the instinctive types, but they nevertheless represent quite a different order of affairs. Nobody is born with the ability forthwith to play the violin or to use the typewriter. Both achievements require long practice and painstaking effort. Speech and walking both have an instinctive basis, to be sure, but both require an extended period of learning before they are at all perfect or complete. Practically all our dexterities and acts of skill are of this character. The putting on and off of our clothing, the manipulation of the common utensils of daily life, our social deportment-expressive of the conventional etiquette of our own time, civilization, and set-our enunciation, our professional habits, even in large measure our moral and religious practices and beliefs, are of this acquired character.

2. Education a Matter of Habit

[DEWEY, John, Human Nature and Conduct, pp. 11, 12, 17. New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1922.]

The most recent masterful exposition of the relation of habit to civic-moral conduct has appeared in Dewey's Human Nature and Conduct. According to Dewey, education is fundamentally a matter of habit, and it is also a matter of moral behavior.

The masses swarm to the occult for assistance. The cultivated smile contemptuously. They might smile, as the saying goes, out of the other side of their mouths if they realized how recourse to the occult exhibits the practice logic of their own belief. For both rest upon a separation of moral ideas and feelings from knowable facts of life, man and the world. . . . A moral based on study of human nature instead of upon disregard for it would find the facts of man continuous with those of the rest of nature and would thereby ally ethics with physics and biology. It would

find the nature and activities of one person coterminous with those of other human beings, and therefore link ethics with the study of history, sociology, law and economics. . . . Since habits involve the support of environing conditions, a society or some specific group of fellowmen, is always accessory before and after the fact. Some activity proceeds from a man; then it sets up reactions in the surroundings. Others approve, disprove, protest, encourage, share and resist. Even letting a man alone is a definite response. Envy, admiration and imitation are complicities. Neutrality is non-existent. Conduct is always shared; this is the difference between it and a physiological process. It is not an ethical "ought" that conduct should be social. It is social, whether bad or good.

3. General Principles of Habit Formation

[DUNLAP, Knight, The Elements of Scientific Psychology, pp. 223–230. St. Louis, C. V. Mosby Co., 1922.] (Adapted.)

Certain general principles of habit formation have been known for a long time. They apply equally well to all reactions which can be modified, whether they are involved in the formation of physical skills as in learning to skate and play tennis, or in learning history and mathematics.

We shall give here merely a brief summary of these principles, or laws. A more detailed discussion of them may be found in Dunlap's Elements of Scientific Psychology.

First Law: Recency.-The tendency for a given situation to arouse a reaction which it has aroused in the past is greater, the more recent the arousal of the reaction by the situation has been. This tendency may, however, be influenced by other situations or conditions. This may be observed most clearly when the response depends entirely upon the preceding repetition, as in the case of learning a puzzle. After a successful solution of the puzzle, the learner may do it a second time, immediately after the first, with ease. He may have to relearn it a short time later.

The law of recency may also be affected by the operation of other factors. In terms of physiology, the neural pattern of a reaction tends to persist after the reaction. As time goes on, other things equal, this connection or bond becomes weaker and weaker unless reëxcited. Other re

actions involving some of the same neural arcs, also tend to modify the bonds of synaptic conditions.

Second Law: Frequency.-The more frequently a given reaction occurs as a response to a given situation, other things equal, the stronger the tendency for the reaction to occur when the situation recurs. This tendency becomes weakened with the passage of time. Repetition strengthens bonds or synaptic connections.

Third Law: Vividness.-The higher the degree of attention given to the stimulus or situation, the stronger the tendency will be to revoke the same reaction at a later time. Inattention seriously affects the forming of a habit. Neurologically, the fixing of a reaction pattern depends upon the integration or coördination of the nervous system involved in the reaction. The more completely the nervous system is integrated by the pattern involved, the more lasting the fixation.

If several stimulus patterns are present, producing a total reaction, the tendency for the most vivid pattern to reproduce the reaction at a subsequent time is greater than the tendency for the less vivid patterns to produce it.

Fourth Law: Emotional Tone.-Moderately strong feelings and emotions facilitate the formation of habits by increasing the retention or by fixation of the reactions with which the emotion is connected or by inhibiting the fixation of conflicting reactions. All types of emotion, pleasant and unpleasant, have this general effect. Reward and punishment are practical ways of inhibiting or facilitating responses. Both reward and punishment are effective in some circumstances. When emotions are directly connected with the reactions they are desired to fix or eliminate, there is but little doubt that they are positive in their effects. When emotions become connected with reactions other than the particular one which is to be learned, they interfere with the learning process. For example, the child, cowed by threats of failure or expulsion by the teacher cannot do his best work. His attention is directed to the impending punishment, not to the lesson to be learned. The emotional tone, in brief, may be a positive aid to learning, or it may be a

great detriment. Just how it influences learning depends on its being connected with the reactions to be learned, or with other reactions conflicting with them occurring at such times as to interfere with them, and thus prevent their fixation and integration in the proper manner.

Fifth Law: The Limits of Mechanism.-Learning and basal capacity are limited by the inherent characteristics of the nervous system, since learning depends upon its integrative function. Some individuals, by original endowment in terms of nervous structure and organization, can learn and retain more easily than others. The limits of learning and retention are dependent not only upon heredity, which determines the general character of the human mechanism, but also upon the metabolic condition of the total organism at the time of learning. In other words, learning is affected by nutritional changes, fatigue conditions, glandular disorder, and other chemical factors.

Sixth Law: Implicit Habits.-The occurrence of a habit reaction may prove the existence of the habit, but its nonoccurrence does not prove its non-existence. Habit tends to persist, and if it functions by enabling the individual to make the habitual response it is called an explicit habit. If it is latent, present but not functioning, it is called an implicit habit. Implicit habit may be illustrated easily in the realm of perpetual and ideational learning. One may fail to recognize a person, or situation, with which one has earlier been entirely familiar. The formerly established reaction pattern while latent appears lost. Subsequently, the habit may reassert itself and the formerly learned perception may occur upon the presentation of the proper stimulus or situation.

Implicit habits, or habits almost formed require but little further repetition to bring them to a point where they are explicit. Habits that have been apparently forgotten or lost may be much more easily relearned than they were learned originally.

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