inner structure, but in its function--in its power to start and direct significant inquiry and reflection. What geometry does for one, the manipulation of laboratory apparatus, the mastery of a musical composition, or the conduct of a business affair, may do for another.
[Sidenote: Continuity] Facts, whether narrow or extensive, and conclusions suggested by them, whether many or few, do not constitute, even when combined, reflective thought. The suggestions must be _organized_; they must be arranged with reference to one another and with reference to the facts on which they depend for proof. When the factors of facility, of fertility, and of depth are properly balanced or proportioned, we get as the outcome continuity of thought. We desire neither the slow mind nor yet the hasty. We wish neither random diffuseness nor fixed rigidity.
Consecutiveness means flexibility and variety of materials, conjoined with singleness and definiteness of direction. It is opposed both to a mechanical routine uniformity and to a grasshopper-like movement. Of bright children, it is not infrequently said that "they might do anything, if only they settled down," so quick and apt are they in any particular response. But, alas, they rarely settle.
On the other hand, it is not enough _not_ to be diverted. A deadly and fanatic consistency is not our goal. Concentration does not mean fixity, nor a cramped arrest or paralysis of the flow of suggestion. It means variety and change of ideas combined into a _single steady trend moving toward a unified conclusion_. Thoughts are concentrated not by being kept still and quiescent, but by being kept moving toward an object, as a general concentrates his troops for attack or defense. Holding the mind to a subject is like holding a ship to its course; it implies constant change of place combined with unity of direction. Consistent and orderly thinking is precisely such a change of subject-matter.
Consistency is no more the mere absence of contradiction than concentration is the mere absence of diversion--which exists in dull routine or in a person "fast asleep." All kinds of varied and incompatible suggestions may sprout and be followed in their growth, and yet thinking be consistent and orderly, provided each one of the suggestions is viewed in relation to the main topic.
[Sidenote: Practical demands enforce some degree of continuity] In the main, for most persons, the primary resource in the development of orderly habits of thought is indirect, not direct. Intellectual organization originates and for a time grows as an accompaniment of the organization of the acts required to realize an end, not as the result of a direct appeal to thinking power. The need of thinking to accomplish something beyond thinking is more potent than thinking for its own sake.
All people at the outset, and the majority of people probably all their lives, attain ordering of thought through ordering of action. Adults normally carry on some occupation, profession, pursuit; and this furnishes the continuous axis about which their knowledge, their beliefs, and their habits of reaching and testing conclusions are organized. Observations that have to do with the efficient performance of their calling are extended and rendered precise. Information related to it is not merely amassed and then left in a heap; it is classified and subdivided so as to be available as it is needed. Inferences are made by most men not from purely speculative motives, but because they are involved in the efficient performance of "the duties involved in their several callings." Thus their inferences are constantly tested by results achieved; futile and scattering methods tend to be discounted; orderly arrangements have a premium put upon them. The event, the issue, stands as a constant check on the thinking that has led up to it; and this discipline by efficiency in action is the chief sanction, in practically all who are not scientific specialists, of orderliness of thought.
Such a resource--the main prop of disciplined thinking in adult life--is not to be despised in training the young in right intellectual habits.
There are, however, profound differences between the immature and the adult in the matter of organized activity--differences which must be taken seriously into account in any educational use of activities: (_i_) The external achievement resulting from activity is a more urgent necessity with the adult, and hence is with him a more effective means of discipline of mind than with the child; (_ii_) The ends of adult activity are more specialized than those of child activity.
[Sidenote: Peculiar difficulty with children] (_i_) The selection and arrangement of appropriate lines of action is a much more difficult problem as respects youth than it is in the case of adults. With the latter, the main lines are more or less settled by circumstances. The social status of the adult, the fact that he is a citizen, a householder, a parent, one occupied in some regular industrial or professional calling, prescribes the chief features of the acts to be performed, and secures, somewhat automatically, as it were, appropriate and related modes of thinking. But with the child there is no such fixity of status and pursuit; there is almost nothing to dictate that such and such a consecutive line of action, rather than another, should be followed, while the will of others, his own caprice, and circumstances about him tend to produce an isolated momentary act. The absence of continued motivation coöperates with the inner plasticity of the immature to increase the importance of educational training and the difficulties in the way of finding consecutive modes of activities which may do for child and youth what serious vocations and functions do for the adult. In the case of children, the choice is so peculiarly exposed to arbitrary factors, to mere school traditions, to waves of pedagogical fad and fancy, to fluctuating social cross currents, that sometimes, in sheer disgust at the inadequacy of results, a reaction occurs to the total neglect of overt activity as an educational factor, and a recourse to purely theoretical subjects and methods.
[Sidenote: Peculiar opportunity with children] (_ii_) This very difficulty, however, points to the fact that the _opportunity for selecting truly educative activities_ is indefinitely greater in child life than in adult. The factor of external pressure is so strong with most adults that the educative value of the pursuit--its reflex influence upon intelligence and character--however genuine, is incidental, and frequently almost accidental. The problem and the opportunity with the young is selection of orderly and continuous modes of occupation, which, while they lead up to and prepare for the indispensable activities of adult life, have their own _sufficient justification in their present reflex influence upon the formation of habits of thought_.
[Sidenote: Action and reaction between extremes] Educational practice shows a continual tendency to oscillate between two extremes with respect to overt and exertive activities. One extreme is to neglect them almost entirely, on the ground that they are chaotic and fluctuating, mere diversions appealing to the transitory unformed taste and caprice of immature minds; or if they avoid this evil, are objectionable copies of the highly specialized, and more or less commercial, activities of adult life. If activities are admitted at all into the school, the admission is a grudging concession to the necessity of having occasional relief from the strain of constant intellectual work, or to the clamor of outside utilitarian demands upon the school.
The other extreme is an enthusiastic belief in the almost magical educative efficacy of any kind of activity, granted it is an activity and not a passive absorption of academic and theoretic material. The conceptions of play, of self-expression, of natural growth, are appealed to almost as if they meant that opportunity for any kind of spontaneous activity inevitably secures the due training of mental power; or a mythological brain physiology is appealed to as proof that any exercise of the muscles trains power of thought.
[Sidenote: Locating the problem of education] While we vibrate from one of these extremes to the other, the most serious of all problems is ignored: the problem, namely, of discovering and arranging the forms of activity (_a_) which are most congenial, best adapted, to the immature stage of development; (_b_) which have the most ulterior promise as preparation for the social responsibilities of adult life; and (_c_) which, _at the same time_, have the maximum of influence in forming habits of acute observation and of consecutive inference. As curiosity is related to the acquisition of material of thought, as suggestion is related to flexibility and force of thought, so the ordering of activities, not themselves primarily intellectual, is related to the forming of intellectual powers of consecutiveness.
CHAPTER FOUR SCHOOL CONDITIONS AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT [Sidenote: Formal discipline] The so-called faculty-psychology went hand in hand with the vogue of the formal-discipline idea in education. If thought is a distinct piece of mental machinery, separate from observation, memory, imagination, and common-sense judgments of persons and things, then thought should be trained by special exercises designed for the purpose, as one might devise special exercises for developing the biceps muscles. Certain subjects are then to be regarded as intellectual or logical subjects _par excellence_, possessed of a predestined fitness to exercise the thought-faculty, just as certain machines are better than others for developing arm power. With these three notions goes the fourth, that method consists of a set of operations by which the machinery of thought is set going and kept at work upon any subject-matter.
[Sidenote: versus real thinking] We have tried to make it clear in the previous chapters that there is no single and uniform power of thought, but a multitude of different ways in which specific things--things observed, remembered, heard of, read about--evoke suggestions or ideas that are pertinent to the occasion and fruitful in the sequel. Training is such development of curiosity, suggestion, and habits of exploring and testing, as increases their scope and efficiency. A subject--any subject--is intellectual in the degree in which _with any given person_ it succeeds in effecting this growth. On this view the fourth factor, method, is concerned with providing conditions so adapted to individual needs and powers as to make for the permanent improvement of observation, suggestion, and investigation.
[Sidenote: True and false meaning of method] The teacher's problem is thus twofold. On the one side, he needs (as we saw in the last chapter) to be a student of individual traits and habits; on the other side, he needs to be a student of the conditions that modify for better or worse the directions in which individual powers habitually express themselves. He needs to recognize that method covers not only what he intentionally devises and employs for the purpose of mental training, but also what he does without any conscious reference to it,--anything in the atmosphere and conduct of the school which reacts in any way upon the curiosity, the responsiveness, and the orderly activity of children. The teacher who is an intelligent student both of individual mental operations and of the effects of school conditions upon those operations, can largely be trusted to develop for himself methods of instruction in their narrower and more technical sense--those best adapted to achieve results in particular subjects, such as reading, geography, or algebra. In the hands of one who is not intelligently aware of individual capacities and of the influence unconsciously exerted upon them by the entire environment, even the best of technical methods are likely to get an immediate result only at the expense of deep-seated and persistent habits. We may group the conditioning influences of the school environment under three heads: (1) the mental attitudes and habits of the persons with whom the child is in contact; (2) the subjects studied; (3) current educational aims and ideals.
§ 2. _Influence of the Habits of Others_ Bare reference to the imitativeness of human nature is enough to suggest how profoundly the mental habits of others affect the attitude of the one being trained. Example is more potent than precept; and a teacher's best conscious efforts may be more than counteracted by the influence of personal traits which he is unaware of or regards as unimportant.
Methods of instruction and discipline that are technically faulty may be rendered practically innocuous by the inspiration of the personal method that lies back of them.
[Sidenote: Response to environment fundamental in method] To confine, however, the conditioning influence of the educator, whether parent or teacher, to imitation is to get a very superficial view of the intellectual influence of others. Imitation is but one case of a deeper principle--that of stimulus and response. _Everything the teacher does, as well as the manner in which he does it, incites the child to respond in some way or other, and each response tends to set the child's attitude in some way or other._ Even the inattention of the child to the adult is often a mode of response which is the result of unconscious training.[9] The teacher is rarely (and even then never entirely) a transparent medium of access by another mind to a subject. With the young, the influence of the teacher's personality is intimately fused with that of the subject; the child does not separate nor even distinguish the two. And as the child's response is _toward_ or _away from_ anything presented, he keeps up a running commentary, of which he himself is hardly distinctly aware, of like and dislike, of sympathy and aversion, not merely to the acts of the teacher, but also to the subject with which the teacher is occupied.
[9] A child of four or five who had been repeatedly called to the house by his mother with no apparent response on his own part, was asked if he did not hear her. He replied quite judicially, "Oh, yes, but she doesn't call very mad yet."
[Sidenote: Influence of teacher's own habits] [Sidenote: Judging others by ourselves] The extent and power of this influence upon morals and manners, upon character, upon habits of speech and social bearing, are almost universally recognized. But the tendency to conceive of thought as an isolated faculty has often blinded teachers to the fact that this influence is just as real and pervasive in intellectual concerns.
Teachers, as well as children, stick more or less to the main points, have more or less wooden and rigid methods of response, and display more or less intellectual curiosity about matters that come up. And every trait of this kind is an inevitable part of the teacher's method of teaching. Merely to accept without notice slipshod habits of speech, slovenly inferences, unimaginative and literal response, is to indorse these tendencies, and to ratify them into habits--and so it goes throughout the whole range of contact between teacher and student. In this complex and intricate field, two or three points may well be singled out for special notice. (_a_) Most persons are quite unaware of the distinguishing peculiarities of their own mental habit. They take their own mental operations for granted, and unconsciously make them the standard for judging the mental processes of others.[10] Hence there is a tendency to encourage everything in the pupil which agrees with this attitude, and to neglect or fail to understand whatever is incongruous with it. The prevalent overestimation of the value, for mind-training, of _theoretic_ subjects as compared with practical pursuits, is doubtless due partly to the fact that the teacher's calling tends to select those in whom the theoretic interest is specially strong and to repel those in whom executive abilities are marked. Teachers sifted out on this basis judge pupils and subjects by a like standard, encouraging an intellectual one-sidedness in those to whom it is naturally congenial, and repelling from study those in whom practical instincts are more urgent.
[10] People who have _number-forms_--_i.e._ project number series into space and see them arranged in certain shapes--when asked why they have not mentioned the fact before, often reply that it never occurred to them; they supposed that everybody had the same power.
[Sidenote: Exaggeration of direct personal influence] (_b_) Teachers--and this holds especially of the stronger and better teachers--tend to rely upon their personal strong points to hold a child to his work, and thereby to substitute their personal influence for that of subject-matter as a motive for study. The teacher finds by experience that his own personality is often effective where the power of the subject to command attention is almost nil; then he utilizes the former more and more, until the pupil's relation to the teacher almost takes the place of his relation to the subject. In this way the teacher's personality may become a source of personal dependence and weakness, an influence that renders the pupil indifferent to the value of the subject for its own sake.
[Sidenote: Independent thinking _versus_ "getting the answer"] (_c_) The operation of the teacher's own mental habit tends, unless carefully watched and guided, to make the child a student of the teacher's peculiarities rather than of the subjects that he is supposed to study. His chief concern is to accommodate himself to what the teacher expects of him, rather than to devote himself energetically to the problems of subject-matter. "Is this right?" comes to mean "Will this answer or this process satisfy the teacher?"--instead of meaning, "Does it satisfy the inherent conditions of the problem?" It would be folly to deny the legitimacy or the value of the study of human nature that children carry on in school; but it is obviously undesirable that their chief intellectual problem should be that of producing an answer approved by the teacher, and their standard of success be successful adaptation to the requirements of another.
§ 3. _Influence of the Nature of Studies_ [Sidenote: Types of studies] Studies are conventionally and conveniently grouped under these heads: (1) Those especially involving the acquisition of skill in performance--the school arts, such as reading, writing, figuring, and music. (2) Those mainly concerned with acquiring knowledge--"informational" studies, such as geography and history. (3) Those in which skill in doing and bulk of information are relatively less important, and appeal to abstract thinking, to "reasoning," is most marked--"disciplinary" studies, such as arithmetic and formal grammar.[11] Each of these groups of subjects has its own special pitfalls.
[11] Of course, any one subject has all three aspects: _e.g._ in arithmetic, counting, writing, and reading numbers, rapid adding, etc., are cases of skill in doing; the tables of weights and measures are a matter of information, etc.
[Sidenote: The abstract as the isolated] (_a_) In the case of the so-called disciplinary or pre-eminently logical studies, there is danger of the isolation of intellectual activity from the ordinary affairs of life. Teacher and student alike tend to set up a chasm between logical thought as something abstract and remote, and the specific and concrete demands of everyday events. The abstract tends to become so aloof, so far away from application, as to be cut loose from practical and moral bearing. The gullibility of specialized scholars when out of their own lines, their extravagant habits of inference and speech, their ineptness in reaching conclusions in practical matters, their egotistical engrossment in their own subjects, are extreme examples of the bad effects of severing studies completely from their ordinary connections in life.
[Sidenote: Overdoing the mechanical and automatic] [Sidenote: "Drill"] (_b_) The danger in those studies where the main emphasis is upon acquisition of skill is just the reverse. The tendency is to take the shortest cuts possible to gain the required end. This makes the subjects _mechanical_, and thus restrictive of intellectual power. In the mastery of reading, writing, drawing, laboratory technique, etc., the need of economy of time and material, of neatness and accuracy, of promptness and uniformity, is so great that these things tend to become ends in themselves, irrespective of their influence upon general mental attitude. Sheer imitation, dictation of steps to be taken, mechanical drill, may give results most quickly and yet strengthen traits likely to be fatal to reflective power. The pupil is enjoined to do this and that specific thing, with no knowledge of any reason except that by so doing he gets his result most speedily; his mistakes are pointed out and corrected for him; he is kept at pure repetition of certain acts till they become automatic. Later, teachers wonder why the pupil reads with so little expression, and figures with so little intelligent consideration of the terms of his problem. In some educational dogmas and practices, the very idea of training mind seems to be hopelessly confused with that of a drill which hardly touches _mind_ at all--or touches it for the worse--since it is wholly taken up with training skill in external execution. This method reduces the "training" of human beings to the level of animal training. Practical skill, modes of effective technique, can be intelligently, non-mechanically _used_, only when intelligence has played a part in their _acquisition_.
[Sidenote: Wisdom _versus_ information] (_c_) Much the same sort of thing is to be said regarding studies where emphasis traditionally falls upon bulk and accuracy of information. The distinction between information and wisdom is old, and yet requires constantly to be redrawn. Information is knowledge which is merely acquired and stored up; wisdom is knowledge operating in the direction of powers to the better living of life. Information, merely as information, implies no special training of intellectual capacity; wisdom is the finest fruit of that training. In school, amassing information always tends to escape from the ideal of wisdom or good judgment. The aim often seems to be--especially in such a subject as geography--to make the pupil what has been called a "cyclopedia of useless information." "Covering the ground" is the primary necessity; the nurture of mind a bad second. Thinking cannot, of course, go on in a vacuum; suggestions and inferences can occur only upon a basis of information as to matters of fact.
But there is all the difference in the world whether the acquisition of information is treated as an end in itself, or is made an integral portion of the training of thought. The assumption that information which has been accumulated apart from use in the recognition and solution of a problem may later on be freely employed at will by thought is quite false. The skill at the ready command of intelligence is the skill acquired with the aid of intelligence; the only information which, otherwise than by accident, can be put to logical use is that acquired in the course of thinking. Because their knowledge has been achieved in connection with the needs of specific situations, men of little book-learning are often able to put to effective use every ounce of knowledge they possess; while men of vast erudition are often swamped by the mere bulk of their learning, because memory, rather than thinking, has been operative in obtaining it.
§4. _The Influence of Current Aims and Ideals_ It is, of course, impossible to separate this somewhat intangible condition from the points just dealt with; for automatic skill and quantity of information are educational ideals which pervade the whole school. We may distinguish, however, certain tendencies, such as that to judge education from the standpoint of external results, instead of from that of the development of personal attitudes and habits. The ideal of the _product_, as against that of the mental _process_ by which the product is attained, shows itself in both instruction and moral discipline.
[Sidenote: External results _versus_ processes] (_a_) In instruction, the external standard manifests itself in the importance attached to the "correct answer." No one other thing, probably, works so fatally against focussing the attention of teachers upon the training of mind as the domination of _their_ minds by the idea that the chief thing is to get pupils to recite their lessons correctly. As long as this end is uppermost (whether consciously or unconsciously), training of mind remains an incidental and secondary consideration. There is no great difficulty in understanding why this ideal has such vogue. The large number of pupils to be dealt with, and the tendency of parents and school authorities to demand speedy and tangible evidence of progress, conspire to give it currency. Knowledge of subject-matter--not of children--is alone exacted of teachers by this aim; and, moreover, knowledge of subject-matter only in portions definitely prescribed and laid out, and hence mastered with comparative ease. Education that takes as its standard the improvement of the intellectual attitude and method of students demands more serious preparatory training, for it exacts sympathetic and intelligent insight into the workings of individual minds, and a very wide and flexible command of subject-matter--so as to be able to select and apply just what is needed when it is needed. Finally, the securing of external results is an aim that lends itself naturally to the mechanics of school administration--to examinations, marks, gradings, promotions, and so on.
[Sidenote: Reliance upon others] (_b_) With reference to behavior also, the external ideal has a great influence. Conformity of acts to precepts and rules is the easiest, because most mechanical, standard to employ. It is no part of our present task to tell just how far dogmatic instruction, or strict adherence to custom, convention, and the commands of a social superior, should extend in moral training; but since problems of conduct are the deepest and most common of all the problems of life, the ways in which they are met have an influence that radiates into every other mental attitude, even those far remote from any direct or conscious moral consideration. Indeed, the _deepest plane of the mental attitude of every one is fixed by the way in which problems of behavior are treated_. If the function of thought, of serious inquiry and reflection, is reduced to a minimum in dealing with them, it is not reasonable to expect habits of thought to exercise great influence in less important matters. On the other hand, habits of active inquiry and careful deliberation in the significant and vital problems of conduct afford the best guarantee that the general structure of mind will be reasonable.
CHAPTER FIVE THE MEANS AND END OF MENTAL TRAINING: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL AND THE LOGICAL [Sidenote: Special topic of this chapter] In the preceding chapters we have considered (_i_) what thinking is; (_ii_) the importance of its special training; (_iii_) the natural tendencies that lend themselves to its training; and (_iv_) some of the special obstacles in the way of its training under school conditions. We come now to the relation of _logic_ to the purpose of mental training.
[Sidenote: Three senses of term _logical_] [Sidenote: The practical is the important meaning of _logical_] In its broadest sense, any thinking that ends in a conclusion is logical--whether the conclusion reached be justified or fallacious; that is, the term _logical_ covers both the logically good and the illogical or the logically bad. In its narrowest sense, the term _logical_ refers only to what is demonstrated to follow necessarily from premises that are definite in meaning and that are either self-evidently true, or that have been previously proved to be true. Stringency of proof is here the equivalent of the logical. In this sense mathematics and formal logic (perhaps as a branch of mathematics) alone are strictly logical.
Logical, however, is used in a third sense, which is at once more vital and more practical; to denote, namely, the systematic care, negative and positive, taken to safeguard reflection so that it may yield the best results under the given conditions. If only the word _artificial_ were associated with the idea of _art_, or expert skill gained through voluntary apprenticeship (instead of suggesting the factitious and unreal), we might say that logical refers to artificial thought.
[Sidenote: Care, thoroughness, and exactness the marks of the logical] In this sense, the word _logical_ is synonymous with wide-awake, thorough, and careful reflection--thought in its best sense (_ante_, p.
5). Reflection is turning a topic over in various aspects and in various lights so that nothing significant about it shall be overlooked--almost as one might turn a stone over to see what its hidden side is like or what is covered by it. _Thoughtfulness_ means, practically, the same thing as careful attention; to give our mind to a subject is to give heed to it, to take pains with it. In speaking of reflection, we naturally use the words _weigh_, _ponder_, _deliberate_--terms implying a certain delicate and scrupulous balancing of things against one another. Closely related names are _scrutiny_, _examination_, _consideration_, _inspection_--terms which imply close and careful vision. Again, to think is to relate things to one another definitely, to "put two and two together" as we say. Analogy with the accuracy and definiteness of mathematical combinations gives us such expressions as Caution, carefulness, thoroughness, definiteness, exactness, orderliness, methodic arrangement, are, then, the traits by which we mark off the logical from what is random and casual on one side, and from what is academic and formal on the other.
[Sidenote: Whole object of intellectual education is formation of logical disposition] [Sidenote: False opposition of the logical and psychological] No argument is needed to point out that the educator is concerned with the logical in its practical and vital sense. Argument is perhaps needed to show that the _intellectual_ (as distinct from the _moral_) _end of education is entirely and only the logical in this sense_; _namely, the formation of careful, alert, and thorough habits of thinking_. The chief difficulty in the way of recognition of this principle is a false conception of the relation between the psychological tendencies of an individual and his logical achievements. If it be assumed--as it is so frequently--that these have, intrinsically, nothing to do with each other, then logical training is inevitably regarded as something foreign and extraneous, something to be ingrafted upon the individual from without, so that it is absurd to identify the object of education with the development of logical power.
[Sidenote: Opposing the _natural_ to the logical] The conception that the psychology of individuals has no intrinsic connections with logical methods and results is held, curiously enough, by two opposing schools of educational theory. To one school, the _natural_[12] is primary and fundamental; and its tendency is to make little of distinctly intellectual nurture. Its mottoes are freedom, self-expression, individuality, spontaneity, play, interest, natural unfolding, and so on. In its emphasis upon individual attitude and activity, it sets slight store upon organized subject-matter, or the material of study, and conceives _method_ to consist of various devices for stimulating and evoking, in their natural order of growth, the native potentialities of individuals.
[12] Denoting whatever has to do with the natural constitution and functions of an individual.
[Sidenote: Neglect of the innate logical resources] [Sidenote: Identification of logical with subject-matter, exclusively] The other school estimates highly the value of the logical, but conceives the natural tendency of individuals to be averse, or at least indifferent, to logical achievement. It relies upon _subject-matter_--upon matter already defined and classified. Method, then, has to do with the devices by which these characteristics may be imported into a mind naturally reluctant and rebellious. Hence its mottoes are discipline, instruction, restraint, voluntary or conscious effort, the necessity of tasks, and so on. From this point of view studies, rather than attitudes and habits, embody the logical factor in education. The mind becomes logical only by learning to conform to an external subject-matter. To produce this conformity, the study should first be analyzed (by text-book or teacher) into its logical elements; then each of these elements should be defined; finally, all of the elements should be arranged in series or classes according to logical formulæ or general principles. Then the pupil learns the definitions one by one; and progressively adding one to another builds up the logical system, and thereby is himself gradually imbued, from without, with logical quality.
[Sidenote: Illustration from geography,] This description will gain meaning through an illustration. Suppose the subject is geography. The first thing is to give its definition, marking it off from every other subject. Then the various abstract terms upon which depends the scientific development of the science are stated and defined one by one--pole, equator, ecliptic, zone,--from the simpler units to the more complex which are formed out of them; then the more concrete elements are taken in similar series: continent, island, coast, promontory, cape, isthmus, peninsula, ocean, lake, coast, gulf, bay, and so on. In acquiring this material, the mind is supposed not only to gain important information, but, by accommodating itself to ready-made logical definitions, generalizations, and classifications, gradually to acquire logical habits.
[Sidenote: from drawing] This type of method has been applied to every subject taught in the schools--reading, writing, music, physics, grammar, arithmetic. Drawings for example, has been taught on the theory that since all pictorial representation is a matter of combining straight and curved lines, the simplest procedure is to have the pupil acquire the ability first to