ilil.li ;) r pi'" Class. Book. P9 Gopightl^ f'-/f /O CPPyRIGHT DEPOSIT. THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY (Third and Enlarged Edition) THE OUTLINES OF Educational Psychology An Introduction to the Science of Education BY WILLIAM HENRY PYLE, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology in the University of Missouri WARWICK & YORK, Inc. Copyright, 1911, By WARWICK & YORK, Inc. Copyright, 1912, By WARWICK & YORK, Inc. ©CI.A330444 CONTENTS Chapter I INTRODUCTION The educational situation, the aim of education, the nature of children, the nature of the educational process, method, educational psychology, edu- cation and psychology, education a process of ad- justment, rage 1 Chapter II BODY AND MIND The evolution of the body, the evolution of the mind, evolution and education, body and mind. Page. . 13 Chapter III HEREDITY What we mean by heredity, the mechanism of heredity, the laws of heredity, mental heredity, special facts of heredity, social heredity, educational in- ferences. Page 24 Chapter IV INSTINCTS Definition and description, experimental studies, in- stincts in man, transitoriness and periodicity of instincts, order of development, early specialisa- tion of instincts, classification of instincts. Page 35 VI CONTENTS Chapter V THE INDIVIDUALISTIC INSTINCTS Nature and number, fear, pedagogy of fear, the fight- ing instinct, causes of anger, manifestations of anger, control and treatment, competition in the schoolroom. Page 48 Chapter VI THE SOCIAL INSTINCTS The gang instinct, churns, gangs and clubs, why gangs are formed, high school fraternities, sympathy and co-operation. Page 61 Chapter VII THE ENVIRONMENTAL INSTINCTS The migration of lower animals, truancies and runa- ways, causes of truancies, the school and the migratory instinct, the collecting instinct, its universality, its development, pedagogy of the col- lecting instinct. Page 74 Chapter VIII THE adaptive INSTINCTS — PLAY Physiological considerations, definitions and theories, development of play instinct, play and moral character, the pedagogy of play, play of adults. Page 91 CONTENTS Vll Chapter IX THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — IMITATION Description and definition, psychological explanation, imitation in lower animals, function and impor- tance, education and imitation, school manage- ment and imitation, contrary suggestion, chil- dren's ideals. Page 108 Chapter X HABIT Nature of habit, function of habit, importance in edu- cation, the ethics of habit, laws of habit forma- tion, repetition, repetition in attention, pleasur- able repetition, habit and attitude. Page 124 Chapter XI HABIT AND EDUCATION Function of the teacher, repetition and practice, ex- ceptions, rules for habit formation, habits are specific. Page 146 Chapter XII HABIT AND MORAL TRAINING Importance of the problem, futility of recent dis- cussions, moral training and psychology, must be based on definite principles, the instincts and moral training, inhibition, repetition and moral training, the school and the home in moral train- ing, practical moral training, the emotions, actions and character, objections considered. Page 164 VllI CONTENTS Chapter XIII MEMOllY Meaning of memory, experimental studies, relation of memory to age and sex, improvement of mem- ory by practice, conditions atfecting retention, first impression, number of repetitions, value of associations, economical learning, transfer of memory training, relation of memory to intelli- gence, function of the teacher in memory work. Page 185 Chapter XIV ATTENTION Neurological point of view, active and passive atten- tion, function of attention, attention and educa- tion, training the attention. Page 206 Chapter XV THINKING Association of ideas, imagination, thinking, training in reasoning, meaning, reason and education. Page 221 Chapter XVI FATIGUE Nature of fatigue, measure of fatigue, the psychologi- cal methods, complicating phenomena, the three phases of fatigue, length of school sessions and school periods, the pedagogy of fatigue. Page . . . 239 Chapter XVII Tests and Norms. Page 2.54 The Appendix. Page 269 PREFACE. The fact that we have had no general text-book in educa- tional psychology has led to the preparation of this book, which is the outgrowth of the work with my own classes. I have endeavored to select for treatment those facts and principles of psychology, fairly well established, that have evident and direct bearing upon the problems of teaching. The time is at hand when every step in educational pro- cedure must have scientific justification. This can come in the main from only one source, — the crucial test of ex- perimental determination. If this volume contributes, in some small measure, toward the end of making education more scientific, I shall feel that its publication will be justified. It has been my aim to be careful and conserva- tive, to keep within the warrant of established fact. How- ever, I realize that nearly every page shows the need of more facts, more data. Experimental psychology is a thing of only yesterday; educational psychology is a new-born infant of today. But it is an infant of great promise. The army of trained investigators that is attacking the myriad problems of the school, will give us, even in a decade, re- sults of great importance to education. But the work must be carefully done. It is my belief that a text-book should be a mere outline, to be elaborated by teacher and students. The questions and exercises and the references will help toward this elaboration. The questions, for the most part, are selected ix X THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY from those asked by my students when the matter of this book was presented to them in class. The references are to such English sources as I have found most helpful. They fall into two classes : (1) parallel systematic treatises and (2) the original reports of experimental work. In neither case, however, are the references complete. They are intended only on the one hand to refer the student to other, and often more extended, treatments of the same subjects, and on the other, to give the beginning student some idea of the nature of the investigations on which the statements of the text are based. My indebtedness, direct and indirect, is great. Directly, I am indebted most of all, to Dr. W. L. Bryan, president of Indiana University, my first teacher in psychology ; to Dr. E. B. Titchener, Sage professor of psychology in the grad- uate school of Cornell University, in whose laboratory I learned something of scientific method ; and to Dr. G. M. Whipple of Cornell, who has shown the possibilities of applying this method to the solution of school-room prob- lems. Indirectly, my greatest debt is to President G. Stanley Hall and the late Professor James. My thanks are also due to President A. Boss Hill and Dean W. W. Charters of the University of Missouri, and to my brother, J. O. Pyle, of Chicago, who have read most of the manuscript and given valuable suggestions. W. H. P. COLUMBIA_, Mo., September 1, 1911. THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Chapter I. INTRODUCTION. The educational situation. — The educational prac- tice of the past has not been based on science as medical practice or good farming is now based on scientific principles. This, of course, does not mean that there has never been any good teaching. Long before there was a science of medicine many good remedies were discovered empirically, although little was known concerning the principles of drugs or the nature of their physiological action, nor was any- thing definite known concerning the nature and causes of disease. Now, however, medical practice has a scientific basis. Much the same can be said of farming. For thousands of years man has been till- ing the soil, and by the slow trial and success method has learned many good practices, but he has not understood the nature of the forces with which he has dealt. He has not known what caused success or failure. The farmer of today can have sufficient scientific facts to make his procedure entirely intel- ligent. Although he can never have complete control of the conditions of his work, he can understand these [1] Z THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY conditions, and can foresee the outcome of given situations. The practice of education has had a similar his- tory. We have had some great teachers in the past, but none of them has understood much of the real nature of what he was doing. If the great teachers themselves have known little of the nature of the material with which they dealt or the causes of their success, much less could their followers know. They could only imitate, with next to no knowledge of the princii)les which underlay their master's success. Systems of education have, for the most part, been based on some philosophical or religious conception. It is not correct to say that these systems have all been wrong; there has been, perhaps, some truth in all of them, just as there has been a grain of truth in most systems of philosophy. For example, some of Plato's ideas on education as expressed in the Re- puhlic can now be scientifically justified. It has been impossible to have a science of educa- tion for the very simple reason that the data that must form a basis for the principles of such a science have not been at hand. What facts must be known before we can have a science of education? They fall into four groups: (1) the aim of education; (2) the nature of children; (3) the essential character- istics of the educational process, and (4) method, i. e., the most economical procedure in attaining the first through the knowledge contributed by the sec- ond and third and by direct investigation made for this sole purpose. The aim of education. — Society at any given time prescribes the type of individual to which it thinks INTRODUCTION . 3 the children of that generation should be made to conform. Education is the institution of society that is to achieve that end, i. e., train the children for action in accordance with the ideals of the times. Just what the type is, depends on the ideals of the age, and could be determined for any given time and people by studying their social ideals. The ideal individual leads such a life as conduces to the general well-being of society. At the present time in our own country there is pretty general agreement as to what this means. The adult male must support himself and family, and in his relations with his fellow men must so conduct himself as to lead to mutual com- fort and happiness. It might seem that if this view of the aim and purpose of education is true, progress would be impossible. But such is not the case. The people of one generation can sometimes see that in some respect or other their relations and adjust- ments could be improved. It is then possible for them to bring up their children in such a way that the children, when grown, will come nearer to the better way of living. Education, then, is to achieve social efficiency; it is the conscious effort of society to give the young such information and such training as will enable them to produce ever a more perfect social life. And doubtless the ideal of social organi- sation will be that condition that will allow and make possible for all the greatest possible individual devel- opment of capacity to achieve and enjoy. Society exists for the individual and the individual exists for society, while education is the process of preparing the individual for his life in society and of making a better society. Every person who is to be a teacher 4 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGT should be a student of tlie science of sociology in order that he may understand society and its insti- tutions, their origin, their evolution and their func- tion. A teacher without such knowledge can only grope blindly after an unknown object, but with such knowledge he can work consciously to achieve the highest social ideals. The nature of children. — A child is a psychophys- ical being, that is, a being that is both mind and body. There are, therefore, two sciences that contribute the second group of facts for a science of education — biology and psychology. Biology tells us about the body, its organs and their functions, its growth and development and its evolution from lower animal forms. Psychology tells us about mind, its elements and the laws of their combination and organisation. Psychology tells us also about the development of individual minds and of the evolution of mind in the animal kingdom. That this second group of facts is necessary for a science of education is evident, for education is blind unless the teacher knows the laws of bodily and mental growth and function. The teacher must know something of nerves and muscles and their conditions of growth and activity ; he must know something of the physical organs and the con- ditions of their healthy functioning. He must know something of sense organs and how to test their effi- ciency. He must know something of instincts, of habits, of perception, memory, imagination, feeling, association and attention. Accurate knowledge on these subjects is absolutely necessary for intelligent procedure in teaching. INTEODUCTION The nature of the educational process. — The teacher must also know the exact nature of the edu- cational process. What is taking place in the child when he is being educated? What is the child doing while he is being educated? What is possible and what is impossible? What is the function of the teacher? These and many more similar questions demand a scientific answer. Both sociology and psy- chology answer this question and both answer it in the same way, namely, in terms of adjustment. Sociology says education is the process by which young individuals are trained to participate in social life. From the point of view of psychology, educa- tion is essentially a process of habit-formation. The new individual is to be acquainted with this material and social world and trained in the appropriate responses to be made in all the varied situations of life. There are, of course, two aspects of education : (1) getting information about the world and (2) mak- ing the right response in the light of this information. But the second factor is the ultimate end, for we need the information only to guide action. If we did not have to move, to respond, we should have no need of sense organs, no need of mind. It has only been the growing complexity of movement, response, that has necessitated the development of sense organs through which we learn of the world. In this process of ad- justment the function of the teacher is limited and his possibilities circumscribed. The utmost that he can do is to manipulate the environment of the child. Both biology and psychology tell us that the child comes to us with a body and mind inherited from his ancestors, with many definite responses already pro- b THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY vided for in the neuro-musciilar system. Heredity, then, sets the first limitation; we can work only within the limits set by heredity. And in a certain sense the child is unapi^roachable, unassailable, he can not be touched, he can not be changed ; he is au- tonomous, he assimilates, he grows. Within certain limits we can change his environment. We can have something to do with the outcome of the child's actions in the way of pleasure and pain, we can make conditions favorable for the activity of one instinct or another, but more than this we can not do, and it is well that we know it. Education, then, is a process of adjustment that teachers and parents can par- tially guide and control by virtue of their power to change and manipulate the child's environment. Method. — Sociology gives us the aim of education, biology and psychology give us the nature of the child, psychology explains the essential nature of the educational process. Psychology also gives us a scientific basis for method. Of course, method can sometimes be inferred from the nature of the child, so that the second grouji of facts, in the largest sense, would include the fourth, but the fourth group of facts deserves independent statement and treatment because every detail of method must have separate and indpendent determination by experimental pro- cedure, although it is true that this procedure is always dependent upon the nature of mind. The best methods of teaching children to read, to spell, to write, to draw, to think, in a word to do all the vari- ous things that we want to learn to do, must be deter- mined experimentally, for in very few cases can they be entirely determined by a priori considerations. INTRODUCTION / So complex are mind and its operations that the na- ture of every aspect of its operation must have inde- pendent determination. Educational psychology. — The term educational psycliology is to some extent a misnomer, for there is really only one kind of i:)sychology, the science which undertakes to work out the structure, function and genesis of mind. Educational psychology, as now generally understood, treats of the application of the principles of psychology to education. It is, indeed, more than a chapter in applied psychology, and per- haps deserves to rank as a distinct subdivision of jDsychology. Psychology has for its problem the de- scription of mind in general; this description it works out in its o^vn way and in its own time as its purely scientific interests demand. Educational psy- chology takes over for its province that aspect of general psychology that has most immediate connec- tion with education. The problems of the general psychologists arise out of the needs of the science as a whole ; the problems of the educational psychol- ogist arise out of the needs of education. The meth- ods and procedure of the latter are, in general, the same as those of the former. Educational psychol- ogy, then, attacks a part of the problem of general psychology, and the only excuse for its existence as a separate subdivision is that education can not afford to wait upon the development of psychology as a whole, for psychology as such is not concerned with problems of education. However, since educa- tional psychology has taken over a specific part of general psychology, its problems have taken on a specific character and its laboratory has its special 8 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY equipment. The educational psychologist must have the same training as the general psychologist, and, in addition, be familiar with the problems and condi- tions of the school room, for he is to be concerned with just those aspects of psychology that have closest connection with these problems and con- ditions. Education and psychology. — By reference to our discussion of the four problems of education, it will be seen how much education must get from psychol- ogy, making educational psychology almost the whole of the science of education. The knowledge of the nature of the child must come in part from psychology, while the nature of the educational process and method must come almost wholly from psychology, and only in small part from biology. A detailed statement of the divisions of these problems will show the topics that are to be treated in this book. Our discussion of the nature of the child must include a statement of the facts of mental evolution and mental heredity, the order and laws of mental development, particularly the development of the in- stincts and all the various mental structures and func- tions, — feeling, perception, imagination, attention, memory, association, thought and action, especially of habits and the laws of their formation. The na- ture of the educational process will receive no fur- ther treatment than is given in the following para- graph, but many of the other topics discussed either directly or indirectly throw light on this question also. The scientific basis of method lies partly in the facts of mental structure, function and development, from which they are inferred or deduced, and partly INTRODUCTION if in the results of special investigations, which have for their sole purpose the experimental determina- tion of economic methods of learning. We must also treat of method, not only from the point of view of general development, but also taking into considera- tion individual variation and abnormal types. Education a process of adjustment. — Both psychol- ogy and biology, as well as sociology, consider edu- cation to be a process of adjustment. A considera- tion of the life of lower animals will make the mean- ing clear. Many, perhaps most, of the lower animals need no training; they come into existence with proper adjustments for life already provided for in the neuro-muscular system. Most of them have no infancy ; from the first their life and life-adjustments are perfect and complete. Such animals do not have to learn, and, in fact, profit little by experience. But in higher animals, especially man, the young are born more or less helpless and with their responses more or less imperfectly adjusted ; they have a period of infancy, during which they acquire the proper ad- justments to the environment ; in other words, they have a period of plasticity, during which they acquire knowledge of their environment and training in the proper responses to make to it. The long infancy in man is one of the chief factors that give him his con- spicuous advantage over the lower animals. Sociol- ogy tells us that infancy, by making necessary the development of the family, has made our civilisation possible. From the point of view of genetic psychol- ogy, infancy is no less important, for it serves as a period for training in adjustment. The only limita- tion to this training is that set by heredity, i. e., by 10 THE OUTLINES OE EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY inherited structure and tlie instincts. Within these limits a wide variation of adjustment is possible. Almost any response can be formed for any situa- tion. Without the period of infancy, adjustment to our complex modern life would be impossible. But with this period the only limit to social progress is, as we have said, that fixed by heredity. Life itself is adjustment, and education is . the perfecting of adjustments during the early years of life. It is therefore a process of training in adjustment and of perfecting and fixing the adjustments. It has, as already pointed out, two aspects: (1) impression and (2) expression. Training con- sists in receiving impressions and learning and perfecting expressions. Knowledge and habit are, therefore, the two poles of education. From this point of view parents and teachers become guides for the child, and should take him by the hand and lead him through all the varied natural and social envi- ronment, and, by controlling and manipulating this environment, guide and determine the responses and adjustments formed by the child. But, as pointed out already, this is the utmost that can be done. What the child becomes is the resultant of two forces, the child and the world. The teacher can to some extent determine what this world shall be, but this is all. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 1. Is it true that the people of any community are agreed as to the qualities or attributes of an ideal citizen? Are they agreed as to the studies that should be pursued in school? 2. Make out a list of the twenty characteristics you consider most desirable in an American citizen. Arrange them in the order of their importance. Name five characteristics on which there is INTRODUCTION H not general agreement. Would the savage American Indian have agreed to your list of twenty characteristics? Will your list be acceptable 5000 years from now? What changes, in this respect, have you undergone in your own lifetime? 3. Does adjustment to surroundings mean submitting to these surroundings without modifying them? 4. Is there any conflict between the interests of the individual and those of society? 5. Is society itself merely an Institution existing for the good it may do for the Individual? 6. Does psychology have anything to say about the character- istics of the ideal citizen? About the aim of education? Are tliore any facts that tell us the kind of individual that we ought to be? Why, for example, do you think people should be honest and truthful? 7. Can the development of the individual be made the aim of education? 8. Should a child's training in adjustment to his environment be equal for all parts of this environment? What rule can you give that will cover this matter? 9. If our ancestors throughout all the past have got along with- out a science of education, why can we not still get along without It? Why will not the methods of rearing children of 10,000 years ago be adequate at the present time? 10. Mention some defect in educational procedure due to Ig- norance. Point out some defects in your own home or school train- ing due to ignorance of parents or teachers. 11. Name some pioneers in the field of educational psychology. 12. Name some specific points on which information would en- able you to make a better teacher or parent. 13. What is the significance of the terms "willing" and "able" in Miinsterberg's definition of the aim of education? 14. If a person does not do as well as he knows, what defect in his training does this indicate? 15. Mention some principles of education held by Plato that can now be scientifically justified. REFERENCES. On the educational situation, G. Stanley Hall, Educational Prob- lems, 1911, the introduction. For discussions of the aim and nature of education : H. Miinsterberg, Psychology and the Teacher, 1909, Ch. Ix. (From the point of view of the philosopher.) M. V. O'Shea, Education as Adjustment, Chs. iv and v. W. C. Bagley, The Educative Process, 1905, Pt. 1. N. M. Butler, The Meaning of Education, Ch. 1. F. E. Bolton, Principles of Education, 1910, Ch. I. J. W. Jenks, Citizenship and the Schools, 1906. (From the point of view of the political economist.) 12 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY H. H. Donaldson, TJie Growth of the Brain, 1895, Chs. xvlii and xix. (From the point of view of the physiologist.) C. A. Ellwood, Sociology and Modern Social Problems, 1910, Ch. XV. (From the point of view of the sociologist.) C. W. Eliot, Education for Efliciency, 1909, Ch. i, Education for Efficiency ; Ch. ii. The New Definition of the Cultivated Man. The Significance of Infancy : John Fiske, Excursions of an Evolutionist, Ch. xii, or in The Des- tiny of Man, Ch. iv and v, or in Outlines of Cosmic Philosophy, Vol. ii, 344. A. F. Chamberlain, The Child, 1900, Ch. i. On the relation of Psychology to Education : E. L. Thorndike, Journal of Educational Psychology, 1910, Vol. 1, p. 5. E. A. Kirkpatrick, Journal of Educational Psychology, 1910, Vol. 1, p. 76. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, 1904, the preface ; also Vol. ii, pp. 496-497. H. Miinsterberg, Psychology and the Teacher, 1909, Chs. xi and xii. John Dewey, Psychological Review, 1900, Vol. vii, 105. William James, Talks to Teachers, 1899, Ch. 1. Chapter II. BODY AND MIND. The background of psychology is biology, and although our interest here is strictly psychological, certain biological presuppositions and considera- tions, as well as certain psychophysical relations, are necessary to make our treatment of mental devel- opment fully intelligible. The evolution of the body. — ' ' The doctrine of evo- lution merely states that the animal world as it exists is naturally developed out of the animal world as it existed yesterday. " It is only a statement of the fact that the temporal relations of phenomena are causal ; the events of today grew out of the events of yester- day, those of yesterday out of those of the day be- fore, and so on back. The animals of today are the natural descendants of the animals of the past, the plants of today of the plants of the past ; in fact, the inorganic, as well as the organic, world is believed to proceed causally from one phenomenon to another. Gravitation and evolution are twin conceptions that bring order out of chaos, put meaning into otherwise meaningless facts. The law of gravity merely states the fact of the orderly arrangement and relation of things in space, and the law of evolution states the fact of the orderly arrangement of phenomena in time. They might very well be called the laws of the orderly arrangement of phenomena in time and [18] 14 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY space. "We must, of course, bear in mind that a law for natural science is no more than a shorthand state- ment of the relationships and uniformities that exist in a body of facts. The old view of the world was static. Events were looked upon as more or less independent and the re- sult of chance. Few men even dreamed of the great, underlying, interpenetrating relationship existing among all things. History was largely the chron- icling of unrelated events; science, a catalogue of unrelated facts. Species of animals and plants were supposed to have originated separately and inde- pendently, each the result of a special creation. The actions of man were supposed to be the result of his own capricious choice, uncaused. In contrast with this view of the world, the present view may be called dynamic. We look upon all things as in flux, yester- day flowing into today and today flowing into tomor- row. Notliing is uncaused, order pervades all things. A complete understanding of the conditions of one situation is the full explanation of the next situation. This view now pervades all thought in science, phil- osophy, literature and history. In fact, the dynamic view is a presupposition of all science. The mind of the scientist thinks in terms of evolution. To illus- trate: the historian of today no longer hunts for facts merely, but for underlying movements and tendencies on which the events float as leaves upon a river. The naturalist of today sees in species only the resultant of the interplay of environmental forces, acting upon the species of the past. We have called the static view old and the dynamic view mod- ern; but it must be said that the dynamic view was BODY AND MIND 15 known and held by many ancient Greek philosophers. It did not, however, enter into the general thought of mankind till modern times. Darwin's Origin of Species was published in 1859, and this date may be considered to mark the beginning of a movement which has revolutionised modern thought. It is not our purpose here to enter into the proofs of evolu- tion — for this the reader must go to biology — but only to state the modern view in order to point out its educational significance. The evolution of the mind. — The evolution of the mind is, in a sense, a correlate of the evolution of the body. The brain and nervous system have developed along with the comj^lexity of body structure. There can no longer be any doubt that mind has developed from great simplicity among lower forms of animals to the more complex mental activity of the higher animals and man. In the animal kingdom as it now exists we find mind in all its various stages of devel- opment. And if we study the mind of any single human individual we find it at first relatively simple, and acquiring day by day new structures and func- tions quite analogous to the development of the body. To any one who makes such a study there can be no question of the development of the individual mind, for it takes place before our very eyes. And every- thing that we know about mental life points to the evolution of mind in general. And just as the evolu- tion of the body is a presupposition of the biologist, so the evolution of mind is a presupposition of the psychologist. Evolution and education. — It is very important that teachers have the evolutionary point of view, — > 16 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY that they see in the child the product, the outcome of the past. They must know that the race has been hammered out in the forge of nature, that the child bears in its every feature the imprint of the past. The teacher must know that the same forces and conditions of the environment that have brought about the development of the race still act upon the child. If these forces and conditions have brought us up out of savagery, they must at least be the start- ing point for modern education, for our bodies and minds presuppose these conditions. The doctrine of evolution must enter into the gen- eral philosophy of the teacher and be a part of his mental equipment. In addition to this general effect of the doctrine, we are indebted to it for several spe- cific aspects of modern education either for their ori- gin or justification. (1) Sequence of development in the life of the child, which makes education possible, is a part of the conception of evolution. This is the notion of recapitulation, which is a biological fact, and, in a broad sense, a psychological fact. Every stage of development is conditioned by the previous stage and the environing forces. This is due to the accumulated experience of organic forms, and doubt- less is as true of mind as of body. Therefore, the necessity of orderly procedure in education has its explanation and justification in evolution. (2) Ac- tivity in education, which lies back of manual train- ing and gymnastics, has its full explanation in evo- lution. In the past it was the response of the indi- vidual to the pressure of the environment that brought about progress, and a priori we should expect such response still to be a condition of prog- BODY AND MIND 17 ress and development. The facts seem to show that this is true. Evolution gives us an interpretation of this fact. (3) The modern nature-study movement has its justification in the doctrine of evolution. The movement is merely a recognition of the fact that we can not neglect noiv the natural and physical condi- tions that have made possible the development of the race. Man has always had the closest relations to his natural environment, and it would be strange indeed if he could now afford to neglect it. (4) Moral train- ing has no meaning except when considered in the light of the evolution of ethical and social ideals. But there is no use to specify details, for every phase of education takes on a new aspect, acquires new meaning and significance, when considered in the light of evolution. Body and mind. — It is already obvious from our discussion that mind and body are very closely r^ lated. It will be well, however, to notice in some detail certain aspects and consequences of this rela- tionship. (1) First one should notice the mere fact of relationship. We know nothing about mind except in its relation to bodies. The exact nature of the connection between them we do not know — we may never know — but we may sometime be able to give a pretty good description of it. We know now that every variation and fluctuation of mind has its corre- sponding variation and fluctuation in the body. It does not seem just correct to say that either is the cause of the other, — that the mental change causes the physical change, or that the physical causes the mental ; so in the present state of our knowledge we say merely that the two sets of phenomena go on 18 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY together and are inseparably connected. (2) The intimate relation of tlie mind is with the changes in the brain and nervous system. There seems to be a complete parallel between intelligence and brain de- velopment throughout the animal kingdom ; the more complex the brain-structure, the higher the intelli- gence of the animal. Not only, then, is mind related to body, but it is more especially and intimately con- nected with nervous activity. (3) It is possible to consider the body of an animal as a mechanism, a mechanical structure greatly differentiated, with parts especially sensitive to certain types of impres- sions. These sensitive structures are all connected with muscular structures, and impressions on the former bring about responses in the latter. This may all be considered as a mechanical process, but while certain parts of this process are going on, namely, the action in the brain cells, set up directly or indirectly by the imjoressions on the sense organs, there is consciousness. We need not concern our- selves in this book with the metaphysical question whether consciousness is a causal element in the physical series. This makes no difference to educa- tion. What the teacher ought to know is that the body may be considered purely as a mechanism, but that the development of the mind is invariably asso- ciated with the development of the mechanical processes, and that whatever the ultimate nature of the relationship may be, it is surely a most intimate one. (4) The mind, as we saw, is dependent upon brain structure and function; intimately associated with brain activity is muscle activity. We have, then, mind, brain, muscle, the great psychophysical trinity, BODY AND MIND 19 the three-in-one, existing in the most intimate rela- tionship, mutually depending, directly or indirectly, the one upon the others, each having no meaning without the others. (5) It seems that in the past mus- cular activity has made the development of our brain necessary, and it is a reasonable assumption that muscular development still has an intimate connec- tion with brain development and therefore with men- tal development. (6) From the point of view of the body it is the muscles and nerves that are trained and educated, and the training consists in the perfec- tion of muscular movement as related to nervous stimulus. (7) Another thing to be noticed is the com- plete dependence of mind, at least in man, upon sense organs. These organs are specialised nerve-endings, each type capable of receiving a certain sort of phys- ical impression. They are the means through which the environment brings about brain changes, — the necessary accompaniment of mind. This fact makes (8) the hygiene of the sense organs of the greatest importance to the teacher. A child without any sense organs would not have enough mind to quarrel about. And a child's mental life is incomplete if any sense- organ is defective or abnormal. It is therefore essen- tial that the teacher know the sensory equipment of the children under his charge, and that school authorities have accurate tests made of the sense organs of the pupils and have medical attention and help given when necessary. It is not only useless to proceed, as teachers, in ignorance of these facts, but it is criminal, for every child has the right to demand of society that all possible be done for his individual development. (9) We must not lose sight of the fact 20 THE 0UTLINE8 OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY that muscular activity is not only the condition of mental development, but the end as well. There seems little reason, ultimately, why we should know except that we may do. Ivnowledge is not itself an end, but only a means, only one step in the complete process of education. Education has suffered greatly in the past because of ignorance or forgetfulness of this fact. Whenever a teacher forgets that action, adjustment, is the end of training, then education begins to be formal and severs its relation to reality and life. It has too often been true that the work of the school room was artificial and had little rela- tion to the life of the time, when, in fact, it ought merely to be an aspect, an expression, of the life of the time, as the outgrowth of that of the past. (10) Under this view, manual training and industrial edu- cation take first rank in the curriculum and become the cornerstone of the educational structure. (11) The sharp distinction and separation of mind and body in the past has been a great error. There have been people who thought that the mind had little use for the body, and who have humiliated and degraded the body. We now see that this is a great mistake, for in order to look properly after the development of the mind we must look most carefully after the bodily conditions. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS YOU FTJETHER STUDY. 1. In what sense is the doctrine of evolution new if many great thinkers from the time of Thales have held it in some form? What led to the general acceptance of the doctrine in the latter part of last century? 2. Does the child of today, on account of evolution and heredity, have greater capacity to learn than was possessed by children a hundred years ago? than the children of twenty thousand years ago? BODY AND MIND 21 3. Is man still undergoing evolution? Will he probably acquire a new sense that he does not now possess? 4. Outline the evidence on which the doctrine of evolution Is based. 5. Is there any evidence at all that stands in the way of accept- ing the doctrine? 6. Why should we distinguish between evolution and theories of evolution? 7. Explain the following terms : Darwinism, natural selection, survival of the fittest, Weismannism, Lamarckianism, spontaneous variation, the DeVries mutation theory. 8. To what extent does the mind of an individual pass through stages of mental development analogous to the minds of lower animals? 9. Is the snail a mere mechanism or does consciousness accom- pany its muscular activity? 10. Is it true that we liave as much right to use the term 'cause* to designate the relation of mind to body as we have for using it to designate the relation between two physical phenomena? 11. What is meant by 'free will'? determinism? From what point of view can we say that we do as ice please? From what point of view can we say that our acts are all determined? 12. Is it true that strong minds are found in weak bodies? If you know of such a case, can you explain it? Look up the biog- raphies of a dozen great men to see what you can learn about their early life. 13. How can you account for rather mature minds in Immature bodies? and how explain immature, undeveloped minds in mature bodies? 14. What Important bearing on education has the fact that the development of the body is absolutely essential to the development of the mind? 15. Why Is It that American schools have not used play and games to the full extent of their possibilities? 16. Professor Swift tells us in Mind in the Making that many great men in this country and England were slow in their develop- ment, got little benefit from their attendance at school and were considered weak-minded by their teachers. What explanation can you give? 17. Look up the biographies of eminent men and see if you find that as many of these men were precocious as children as were backward. 18. What motives have Induced school authorities to put manual training into the schools? 19. If mind and body are so closely related, can we say that all education is education of the mind? 20. What is meant by 'hygiene of the mind'? Is there any hygiene of the mind ap^irt from the hygiene of the body? 22 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 21. G. Stanley Hall says that school hygiene is the most im- portant part of pedagogy. In what sense is this true? 22. Is your own body in good condition? Are your eyes and ears perfect? Would there be as good reason for requiring teach- ers to pass a physical examination as there is for requiring them to pass a mental examination? Do you know of any cities that require teachers to pass a physical examination? 23. To what extent should teachers be i)rcpared to examine and test the pupils as to their physical health and sensory capacity? Should some training in medicine and nursing be part of a teacher's equipment? 24. Describe simple tests for determining visual and auditory defects. Give Illustrations of the effects on life and character of such defects. REFERENCES. The evidence of the evolution of organic forms Is the whole science of biology, and specific references are almost out of the question, and since no student should undertalie the study of edu- cational psychology without at least a general knowledge of biology, such references are unnecessary. The general nature of this evi- dence, however, may be found in such books as : J. LeConte, Evolution; its nature and evidences and its rela- tion to Religious Thought, 1891. H. F. Osborne, From the Greeks to Darwin, 1902. General text-books in zoology. A good notion of the significance of the doctrine of evolution may be obtained from the essays in the commemorative volume, Fifty Years of Darwinism, 1909. On the evolution of mind, see the article on Evolution and Psy- chology, by G. Stanley Hall, in Fifty Years of Darwinism; also, K L. Thorndike, The Evolution of the Human Intellect, in Popular Science Monthly, 1901, Vol. Ix, 5S. E. A. Kirkpatrick, Point of View of Genetic Psychology, Journal of Ed. Psy., Vol. i, 76 ; Genetic Psychology, 1909, Ch. xi. On the relation of mind and body : II. Miinsterberg, Psychology and the Teacher, 1909, Chs. xiii and xiv. E. B. Titchener, A Texthook of Psychology, 1910, pp. 9-15. On the dependence of mental development on muscular develop- ment : Hall's Adolescence, Ch. iii. H. H. Donaldson, The Growth of the Brain, 1899 ; is a book that emphasizes the importance of the brain and nervous system in edu- cation. On mental and physical examination and medical inspection : G. M. Whipple, Manual of Mental and Physical Tests, 1910. Tests of sensory capacity, Ch. xi. Questions in School Hygiene, 1909 ; very helpful in the study of school hygiene ; gives extended refer- ences on all aspects of the subject. L, H. Gulick and L. P. Ayres, Medical Inspection of Schools, BODY AND MIND 23 1910. A splendid treatment of the subject. The student is espe- cially referred to the first three chapters for a general treatment of the subject, and to chapter viii for examinations of vision and audition. Any good text in school hygiene gives directions for tests of sensory capacity. See such as those by Barry, Hope, Newsholme and Shaw. J. M. Taylor, Motor Education for tJie Child, Pop. Set. Mo., Ixxviii, 2G8 ; L. M. Ternian, 27te Relation of Manual Arts to Health, Pop. Sci. Mo., Ixxviii, 602. V. L. Kellogg, Darwinism Today, 1908; M. M. Metcalf, An Out- line of the Theory of Organic Evolution, 1904; E. B. Poulton, Essays on Evolution, 1908; II. de Vries, Species and Varieties: Their Origin l)y Mutation, 1905, Chapter HI. HEREDITY. What we mean by heredity. — If we apply heat to a duck's egg, a duckling will hatch from the egg; if tbe heat be a^Dplied to a hen's egg, then a chick hatches from the egg. We never have any doubt about the outcome if we know what kind of egg the heat is applied to. If we plant corn, and the proper amount of heat, air and moisture is available, the seed sprouts, produces stalks and eventually ears of corn. If the seed planted is wheat, then wheat grows from the seed. An acorn produces an oak and not an elm. Here, again, we have no doubt about the outcome if we know what kind of seed is planted. Such popular expressions as *'hke father, like son"; ''chip of the old block," etc., make it clear that it is the popu- lar belief that the same rule holds good with man- kind, that if we know the parents, we can predict with considerable confidence concerning the offspring. It seems to be a universal principle in the organic world that like produces like. The new being is not exactly like its progenitors ; there is always some variation, but the new growth is, as a rule, more like that from which it came than it is like the forms in other lines of descent. Heredity is a necessary corollary of evolution, for after natural selection has ehminated the unfit, the [24] HEREDITY 25 characteristics of tlie fit must be transmitted to the next generation. One of the fundamental character- istics of organic matter is irritabihty. This means only that the mechanical and chemical effects of the environing forces bring about a readjustment of the organism. For progressive development to be pos- sible the organism must retain some trace of this readjustment that will make the same reaction likely when the same stimulus is repeated. This likelihood of the same response to the same stimulus is the fundamental fact of heredity. The mechanism of heredity. — The first problem set by heredity is that of its mechanism. How is the transmission of characteristics accomplished? In the lower forms of animals — the protozoa — the prob- lem is fairly simple. The protozoan's body is com- paratively simple and relatively homogeneous. The single cell merely divides to produce a new individ- ual. After the division, each of the new animals is composed of parts of the various simple structures of the parent animal, and retains whatever tenden- cies to response the parent had. In a certain sense there is no heredity among these lower forms, be- cause there is no real reproduction here. One animal merely divides into two or more animals, and each of the new animals possesses the characteristics of the parent form, for in a sense they are the parent. Only two principles, then, are necessary to account for heredity among the lower protozoa : (1) internal forces of the organism adjusting it to the forces of the environment; (2) the formation of habits, i. e., the fixing, by repetition, of types of response. The responses which an organism gives to definite stimu- 26 THE OUTLINEG OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY lation are made definite by repetition ; the result of this fixing may be called organic habit. Among higher forms of animals the problem is more complex. The body is differentiated into vari- ous complex substances and structures, and repro- duction is not accomplished by the simple division of the parent form. However, although the problem here is more complex to work out in detail, it is ulti- mately the same as in the lower forms and involves only the same two principles. All higher animals come from a fertilized cell or egg. This single cell de- velops into the complex structure of the adult animal. Of course, the differentiation of special reproductive tissue and body tissue, and the production of the latter by the former, presents a special group of problems. Various hypotheses have been advanced to account for the facts, — such as Darwin's pangene- sis theory, Weismann's germ-plasm theory, the pre- formation theory, and what might be called the dy- namic theory, — the view that each step in the devel- oping individual is conditioned by the environment. For discussion and criticism of these theories the student must be referred to biology. Recapitulation and heredity. — One fact of hered- ity, fairly well established, is that the individual in its development proceeds through successive stages analogous to the stages passed through in the evolu- tion of the species. This fact has its explanation in the two facts of heredity mentioned above. The cell from which the higher animal develops possesses the traces or effects of the past environment of the ani- mal's kind and the responses to that environment; therefore, if the proper conditions are supplied to HEREDITY 27 the developing cell it responds — in its adjustment — step by step in harmony with the tissue of which it is a part. In other words, a developing animal re- sponds to the environing forces according to the habits of response fixed by the continued responses of its ancestors. Such, briefly, are the facts of the mechanism of heredity, — simple enough in outline, but it may be a long time before the biologist can give us the facts in detail. > The laws of heredity. — (1) Galton's law. The sta- tistical studies of Sir Francis Galton and others seem to indicate a tendency toward mediocrity. Tall parents have children taller than the average, but not so tall as the parents ; similarly, the children of short parents are shorter than the average, but not so short as their own parents. The children of un- usually intelligent parents are above the average, but not so intelligent as their parents. This means that the offspring tend to approach a type. Statis- tics seem to indicate that this is true. The fact is usually known as Galton's law, and is stated as fob lows : The immediate parents contribute one-half of the hereditary tendency of the offspring, the grand- parents one-fourth, the great-grandparents one- eighth, and so on back. Now, while statistics indicate a tendency toward an average or type, it is quite likely that the facts are much more adequately accoimted for in other ways. (2) Mendel's law, perhaps, ex- presses a more fundamental fact. Eecent studies of heredity indicate that physical characteristics are transmitted as unit cJiaracters, and that this trans- mission is pure. For example, if yellow and white corn are mixed or crossed, the first crop will be all 28 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY yellow, but if all the seed of the second crop is planted and allowed to cross, one-fourth of the next crop will be white, and if planted separately will breed true, with no yellow product, showing the pure transmission of the unit character, white, although the white corn had been crossed with yellow. This principle of transmission has already been found to cover a large number of cases, and may ultimately be proved to be a general law of physical heredity of wide application. Mental heredity . — Are mental characteristics transmitted in the same way as physical? From what we know of the intimate relation of mind and body, mental heredity becomes a natural and legit- imate inference from the facts of physical heredity, since the nervous structures that underlie mental traits and tendencies doubtless are inherited. The few studies that have been made on mental heredity corroborate this inference. However, the detailed facts of mental heredity have yet to be made out. It may be a reasonable conjecture at this stage of our knowledge that mental traits are transmitted by heredity in just as true a sense as are physical traits, and we may even guess that there are unit characters of mind corresponding to unit physical characters, but this is a mere guess, and there is practically no evidence at this time to support it. Special facts of heredity. — ( 1 ) Atavism. Occasion- ally children are born possessing some peculiarity not now common, but supposed to have been a com- mon attribute of remote ancestors. This reappear- ance of old characters is known as atavism. Exam- ples are extra digits, hairy or horny skin, etc. When HEREDITY 29 these characteristics appear, they usually persist in the offspring for several generations. There is a record of six generations of horny-handed people in France. (2) Disease not inherited. It seems to be established that diseases are not inherited. They may be transmitted by infection from mother to off- spring before birth, but not inherited in the true sense. (3) Acquired characteristics not inherited. In the present state of our knowledge it looks as if the past ages of our experience have given the germ- cell such inertia or momentum that little, if any, effect is produced on the germ-development by the life of the immediate parents before the germ begins its development. It is perhaps impossible for any effect to be produced, for early in the development of the individual the reproductive tissue is differenti- ated from the body — or somatic — tissue. The body tissue supplies it with nourishment, but is helpless to produce other effects than those that proceed from good or poor nourishment. The effects of our educa- tion and training are not transmitted to our children, but the neuromuscular structures that make our own training possible are transmitted to them. Any spon- taneous variation of the germ-cell making possible unusual education and training is doubtless trans- mitted by heredity, and this is an important fact for education, for it amounts to the same thing as the transmission of our acquirements. Although the child can not inherit the learning of his father, he may, perhaps, inherit the capacity for such learning. The only bad thing is that the young must go through the learning process, and this may not be without its blessing. 30 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Social heredity. — Although acquired characters are not transmitted, the fact that children live for many years with their parents and gradually take on the be- liefs, manners, customs, traditions, and even the poli- tics and religion of their parents, largely takes the place of such transmission. This means of coming into possession of the social products of civilization is known as social heredity. It is not heredity in the same sense as the other form of transmission that we have discussed, which may be called natural heredity, but since the result is to make children like their parents and elders in social habits, social hered- ity is a very appropriate term. We learn to speak, write, and in general act as our parents do, much as if instincts for these performances were inherited. The attainments of parents and adults generally are handed down to the children of the generation through social heredity. This influence is almost as certain and definite as natural heredity. We are born into a system of social relationships, and through imitation we learn to play our part in these relation- ships. However, the only field left open for social heredity is that not covered by inherited instincts, except that there is a certain possibility of modifying these instincts through social pressure. It may be said that the strength and definiteness of social heredity is inversely proportional to that of natural heredity. The old, individualistic instincts are least affected by social pressure. The importance of so- cial heredity is due to two facts : (1) the long period of infancy and (2) the strength of imitation during early life. During the long period of infancy the child is plastic and takes on the form of activity that HEREDITY 31 he sees about him. He continues to imitate what he sees till the response becomes a fixed habit and a part of his nature, approximating instincts in definiteness and regularity. By the time that we reach maturity, social pressure, acting upon our inherited instincts, has moulded us into the sort of responding organism that we are to be through life, the acquired habits being largely matters of reflex response and under the control of the centers of the spinal cord. So the importance of social heredity, within the limits of its possibilities, is about as great as that of natural heredity. Educational inferences. — (1) The tremendous force of heredity. We are more alike than we are different. The older racial traits are the strongest, and the fundamental characteristics of our race are measurably the same for all of us. These common factors of heredity may be presui)posed by education. (2) The great importance of small differences. It is the fact that we are, on the whole, alike that gives to small variations their great importance. Small dif- ferences may ultimately mean a fool, on the one hand, or a genius, on the other. A favorable envi ronment may mean the saving of the fool, helping him to become S3lf -supporting and keeping him out of the poor- house or prison; while an unfavorable environment may make of him a criminal or pauper. It is also in the interest of society to favor, in every possible way, the development of any unusual capacity in an indi- vidual. (3) Eugenics. This term may be defined as the science of improving the human race by breeding. It undertakes to discover the laws of heredity and consciously to apply them to the improvement of the 32 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY human stock. It may hope at least to conserve the small favorable variations and to some extent elimi- nate the unfit. (4) The development of social ideas now renders largely impossible the elimination, by natural selection, of the socially unfit. Therefore, the only way to eliminate them is to make their origin impossible. The importance of the study of heredity, with the idea of discovering its laws and applying them to the improvement of the human race, is very great. Teachers should, therefore, lend their influ- ence to social measures looking toward the study of heredity by the pure and applied sciences. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 1. Distinguish between facts and theories of heredity. 2. Write a brief statement summarizing the main facts of hered- ity. 3. What aspects of heredity do we try to account for by theo- ries? What theory seems to account best for the facts? 4. Make a study of your own physical and mental Inheritance. Consider height, hair and eye color and such mental traits as you can get data on. Do you find any evidence of Galtou's law, of Mendel's law? 5. Do you And In your study any evidence of the transmission of eye defects ; of any other physical defects or deformities? 6. Collect statistics showing the Inheritance of mental traits. Can you eliminate the effects of training and imitation on the traits studied? 7. Can you trace the inheritance of specific traits to your mother, to your father, to a more remote ancestor? 8. Is there any specific branch of study in which you inherit either superior or inferior ability? Can you eliminate the effects of training and imitation? 9. Collect statistics showing that genius Is the result of nature, and not nurture. Can you cite evidence that seems to show the contrary? 10. Is It probable that many unusual minds are lost to society on account of an unfavorable environment? 11. Discuss the following statement of Thorndlke's: "The one thing that educational theorists of today seem to place as the fore- most duty of the schools — development of powers and capacities — Is the one thing that the schools or any other educational forces can do \east"— Ed. Psy., 1903, p. 45. HEBEDITY 33 12. Make a list of mental characteristics that are little affected by the schools. 13. From the point of view of heredity, how ma^ sve state the function of the schools? 14. Is it possible to determine the relative influence of heredity and environment in the case of the Juices family? 15. Collect evidence showing the outcome of raising children of poor parentage in good environments ; be sure of your facts con- cerning the child's parentage. 16. Cite facts showing that we are not all equal by birth. 17. Should the schools undertake to discover the natural capaci- ties of individuals and educate accordingly? If a person has am- bition for a career in a certain field, but has little capacity in that field, should he be encouraged to carry out his ambitions in that direction? Should everyone be given a higher education? Does society have any right to set any limitation to the pursuits of an individual? 18. Do you know of any cases of atavism or reversion? 19. Make a list of the characteristics that you have as a result of social heredity. 20. Mention several things in the line of race improvement that the State is warranted in doing now. Cite examples of the propa- gation of the grossly unfit. REFERENCES. For Brief General Treatment : E. L. Thorndike, Educational Psychology, 1910, Chs. v and vli; E. A. Kirkpatrick, Fundamentals of Child Study, 1909, Ch. xv. On the Biological Aspects ot Heredity : J. Loeb, The Dynamics of Living Matter, 1906; E. B. Wilson, The Cell: Its Development and Heredity, 1896; H. B. Orr, A Theory of Development and Heredity, 1895 ; A. Weismann, The Germ Plasm, 1893, especially part 1 ; G. J. Romanes, An Examination of Weismannism, 1899, especially chapter ill ; H. de Vries, Species and Varieties: Their Origin and Mutation, 1906. The Mutation Theory, 1910 ; G. A. Reid, The Principles of Heredity, 1905, from the point of view of a physician ; J. A. Thompson, Heredity, 1908 ; D. C. Punnett, Mendelism, 1911. On Mental Heredity : F. Galton, Hereditary Genius, 1892: Natural Inheritance, 1894; Noteworthy Families, 19- cestors, personal failings, their children, or per- chance their chickens. Causes of anger. — In general, anything interfering with one's procedure, one's happiness, evokes the fighting response. Usually we have some particular ** anger zone," some particularly sensitive spot, as mentioned above, that never fails to arouse the tiger within us. These zones are widely different in differ- ent people. I have several times taken a census of my classes and found such as the following: seeing the strong impose on the weak, to have others med- dle, thwarting of purpose, maligning of friends, see- ing a person persuading another to do wrong, to hear cursing, to have one's failures mentioned, seeing bright red, seeing people smoke, seeing affection dis- played publicly, to see disrespect, to see others mas- ticate, to see a horse mistreated, cheating, deceit, etc. What interferes with our pursuits and our happiness angers us, and since these pursuits are different for all of us, different things call forth our anger. Manifestations of anger. — Anger in children is shown by such phenomena as biting, scratching, gnawing the teeth, making 'faces,' stamping, swal- lowing, frothing at the mouth, butting and pound- ing with the head. There are also such changes in involuntary movements as change of heart-beat and breathing. The voice roughens, especially in older people. Children often snarl like wild animals and show their teeth and bite like a dog. Whether this is a matter of imitation or of heredity would be difficult to say without further study. Control and treatment.— Children can and should be taught a measurable degree of control of at least 56 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY the more violent outbursts of anger. Hall tells us that one function of education is to train and tutor the savage mind, and for this purpose recommends plain talks and spanking, and, as prophylactics, good health, work and regularity. Simple methods are — to gain control of the voice, drop the jaw, relax the muscles, pause and reflect and give inhibiting ideas time to rise. Different people have adopted various ingenious means of working off the surplus energy usually manifested in anger, in such ways, for in- stance, as sawing wood, playing the piano, biting the finger nails, chewing a toothpick or a nail. Much wisdom is needed in dealing with angry children. Sometimes they should be neglected, sometimes spanked, and should be allowed to suffer the conse- quences of their angry acts when these lead to the destruction of playthings and other property. How to deal with fighting among boys is a serious prob- lem. Hall thinks that physical combats in certain periods of a boy's life are necessary to develop man- liness and self-respect, but this is very doubtful. It may be developing a good deal higher type of man- hood for a child to learn self-control and to restrain his savage passions. However, in the present diver- sity in the manner of bringing up children it would not do for an individual parent or teacher to forbid fighting absolutely. But if there were a general agreement among the people of a neighborhood that the children should not fight, it is very doubtful that any lack of manliness would result from the absence of fighting. At present, about all that can be said is that teachers and parents should assume the attitude that fighting is not proper, but should not absolutely THE INDIVIDUALISTIC INSTINCTS 57 prohibit it, and then deal with each case that comes up, on its merits. Certainly, in our modern society we do not consider it necessary to 'smash' our neigh- bor's nose (except in the rarest of instances) in or- der to maintain our honor. We consider it rather a poor kind of honor that has to be maintained in that way. Therefore, unless it can be shown to be essen- tial to individual development, fighting should not be fostered in children. And to satisfy the purposes of individual development, doubtless the instinct can be given activity in some direction other than physical encounter. It will be a bad thing for civilisation if the fighting spirit ever dies out, but there are plenty of means for its development; there are plenty of things in our modern society that need 'smashing' quite as much as our neighbor's nose, and that re- quire a good deal more courage in the operation. Therefore, Hall is stating a more important truth when he says that we should teach the child to know the things that should arouse his righteous indig- nation. Competition in the school room. — Competition is based on the fighting instinct. The proper use to make of competition in the teaching process is a seri- ous question, but there are certain facts that can guide us in its solution. There can be no question of the strength of the incentive of competition, but the value of its use should be determined by comparing the results obtained from its use with those obtained by using other incentives. If a teacher or parent can appeal to the instinct of competition without injury to the disposition or character of the children, then its use is legitimate. But there are certainly serious 58 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY dangers. If a child does something merely to beat someone else, then it means that he is happy in his own success and his neighbor's failure. Is this a trait that we wish to develop in modern society ? It certainly is not. We no longer believe that we must succeed at the expense of our neighbor, but that our mutual success is best for both of us. While this is true, it is by no means certain that we can afford to give up all forms of competition. If an instinct so strong and so universal as that of fighting can be utilised, we certainly should lay hands on it, pro- vided that we can do so to the ultimate good of the individual. This is possible, and competition can have at least a subsidiary function as a motive. Group or class competition can often well be used without injury; one can compete with one's own rec- ord, and even with one's fellows, to the end of bring- ing forth the best efforts of each, as is done in sports, without glorying in the defeat of one's fellows. It sometimes happens that to be beaten by a fellow will arouse a boy or girl to put forth the best that is in him or her when nothing else will, and at the same time there will be no resentment toward the victori- ous champion that put them on their mettle. Much depends on the wisdom of parents and teachers, and those with tact and judgment can make much use of competition without injury and without making it either the chief means or the end of education. The only individualistic instincts not more or less closely associated with fear or the fighting instincts are those connected with feeding. The latter are of no great educational importance, and are not treated here. THE INDIVIDUALISTIC INSTINCTS 59 QUESTI03SrS AND TOPICS FOR FURTHER STUDY. 1. Make out a complete list of the human individualistic In- stincts. 2. Give incidents from your own experience or observation to show that in time of crises individualistic tendencies are likely to prove stronger than any other. Have you observed any excep- tions? 3. What is there in our laws relating to the punishment of murder that takes account of the strength of individualistic In- stinctive tendencies? 4. Make out a list of all the things that excite fear in you. Which of these fears can you explain? For which ones have you no explanation? Can' you trace any of these fears to the actions of your parents? How many of your fears can be traced to an unhappy early experience? 5. Are you afraid to walk alone at night through a cemetery? What is the basis of our fear of the supernatural? Have super- natural agencies ever injured our ancestors? Did a ghost ever hurt anybody? 6. Make a study of the fears of children and see if you can verify the statement of the text in regard to the pedagogy of fear. 7. Have you outgrown any fears of childhood? How could a person be cured of some unreasonable fear? 8. Are all children, regardless of their treatment, at some time afraid of the dark? Does it do any good to explain to a child that there is nothing to be afraid of? 9. Explain the fear of engines, automobiles and other things that were not common to our ancestors. 10. Compare the necessities of fear at the present time with the necessities of fear in the primitive life of man. 11. Write an account of the fights of your childhood, stating their causes and their results. Do you consider the results beneficial to you? 12. Can a child's 'will' be completely subdued? Is such a result desirable? 13. Is it better for a child to have too much or too little regard for and confidence in himself? 14. Compare the control exercised over the individualistic in- stincts by the untutored savage and by a high type of civilized man. On the other hand, cite the acts of an American mob that are on a par with those of the primitive savage. 15. Did you ever want to kill anybody? Did you ever plan to do so? 16. Why are most individualistic instincts considered bad? Show that they were fortunate possessions under primitive condi- tions. 17. Would you prophesy a happy or an unhappy future for a boy of seven who is distinguished because of his tendency to resent any trespassing upon what he fancies are his rights? Contrast with 60 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY this type the one that rarely otters opposition to the aggression of playmates or others. (O'Shea.) 18. Are the boys that make the highest marks in school the best fij^^ters on the playground? 19. Under our modern social conditions, does the person that is always fighting accomplish the most? Compare Presidents of the United States in this regard. 20. As you look upon it now, what was the effect of competition on your life in childhood? 21. Indicate the legitimate and illegitimate uses of competition In school work. Is it a good thing for people to meet failure and be defeated occasionally? Can you recall instances in your own life when failure did you good? 22. A boy can run faster in a race than when running alone. Is a like thing true when applied to his studies? 23. Point out instances showing the bad effects of uncondition- ally forbidding fighting. See H. D. Marsh, Point of View of Modern Education, 1905, p. 70, for an example. 24. Give your experience with group competition. Can you cite instances to show that friendly rivalry with good feeling is possible and good? REPERENCES. On Fear — E. A. Kirkpatrick, Fundamentals of Child Study, Ch. vl, p. 99 ; G. Stanley Hall, in American Journal of Psychology, Vol. viii, p. 147 ; E. Barnes, studies in Education, Vol. i, p. 18 ; H. M. Stanley, Psychological Review, Vol. I, p. 241 ; American Journal of Psychology, Vol. ix, p. 418 ; M. W. Calkins, Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. iii, p. 319 ; W. Preyer, TJie Senses and the Will, 1895, p. 164 ; J. Sully, Studies in Childhood, 1895, Ch. vi. Adolescence, Vol. i. p. 451 ; Vol. ii, p. 370 ; B. Perez, First Three Years of Childhood, 1892, p. 62 ; A. E. Tanner, The Child, 1904, p. 219. On Anger and the Fighting Instinct — G. Stanley Hall, Am. Jr. Psych.. Vol. X, p. 516 ; Adolescence, Vol. i, pp. 220 and 354 ; Vol. ii, p. 367 ; Educational Problems, p. 251 ; B. Perez, First Three Years of Childhood, 1892, p. 66; M. V. O'Shea, Social Development and Education, Chs. vii and viii ; F. L. Burk, Teasing and Bullying, in Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. iv, p. 336; A. E. Tanner, The Child, 1904, p. 216 ; G. Ordahl, Rivalry, its Genetic Development and Peda- gogy, in Ped. Sem., Vol. xv, p. 492. Chapter VI. THE SOCIAL INSTINCTS. The chief social instincts are gregariousness or the gang instinct, responses connected with the emotion of sympathy, including altruistic responses and sim- ple forms of co-operation, and certain responses of instinctive nature that are connected with the love of approbation. Gregariousness or the gang instinct. — Children naturally desire to be with other children. It makes no difference how well occupied or how contented a boy may be; the sight of another boy or group of boys is quite enough to disturb his peace of mind. He immediately prefers to join the other boys and play with them. Parents are sometimes shocked when they first discover that they are not all-suffi- cient for their children, that their children prefer children rather than their own parents as playmates. There seems no question that children, if free from adult interference, are responding to a natural de- sire and perhaps to a natural necessity when they come together to play. Although the individualistic instincts are so strong that in the early years of childhood play is seldom harmonious for long at a time, nevertheless the gang instinct is at work and gradually gains the ascendency over the individual- istic tendencies, the latter to some extent becoming subordinate to the former. The trouble that children [61] 62 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY of the present day have in getting along together is, perhaps, in large measure due to parental interfer- ence and meddling. If the children were allowed to settle their own matters in their own way, they would doubtless get along much better than they do. A cer- tain form of stability and equilibrium would be estab- lished and maintained. Moreover, the fights that primitive children engaged in were doubtless fitting preparations for the life that they were to live. As far as we have any direct knowledge, consider- able association with other children seems to be nec- essary for the normal development of a child. How- ever, it is well toward adolescence before the tenden- cies that lead to co-operation are strong enough to enable children to sink their individuality and work for the good of the group, — club, gang, school, team, class, or whatever the social group may be. Children often form clubs, doubtless in imitation of those of older children, before the social tendencies are suffi- ciently strong to hold them together. The result is usually not a happy one ; the children quarrel and get along badly because they can not put the interests of the group above their own desires. Just before adolescence, however, the tendencies underlying the gang instinct are strong enough to enable a club to hold together for a season. The clubs and gangs that are formed in later childhood and youth as a result of these tendencies, and from other causes dis- cussed in a later paragraph, furnish one of the im- portant problems to the teachers of our towns and cities, and to some extent to those of the rural schools as well. THE SOCIAL INSTINCTS 63 Chums. — Chumming is, perhaps, a specialised ex- pression of the gang instinct, and deserves separate consideration. Investigation reveals the fact that most children at some time or other have chums. In chumming, each child suffices for the other, often to the entire exclusion of other children. It is a com- mon thing in the school room to see two children who wish to be constantly together; when play- time comes, they seek each other's company and care not for the society of other children. This is not best for young children, as we shall see when we come to study the instinct of imitation. Whatever be the merits of any child, they are not sufficient to consti- tute a social environment large enough for any other child. The effect of chumming on young children can not be other than narrowing and leads to exclu- siveness and snobbishness. Sometimes the stronger child dominates the weaker one, leading him into mis- chief. Among older children, chumming often causes neglect of duties and thoughtlessness toward oth- ers. Chums care not for the rest of the world, for they are self-sufficing, as they think, but in the end this certainly can not be so, at least for young chil- dren. There are, nevertheless, certain good things that come from having a close chum. Among the good influences that have been mentioned by my stu- dents as a result of their chum experience are the fol- lowing: (1) the gaining of higher ideals from a chum; (2) one person supplements the character of another; (3) as a result of the supplementing of character, one chum acts as a check on the other; (4) teaches unselfishness; (5) broadens by teaching the value of friendship; (6) chum stimulates to ef- 64 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY fort. Doubtless much depends on the temperament, character and age of the people concerned. It may very well be that in later youth the experience may be very beneficial to both concerned. A strong child may be of great help to a weaker and get as much help himself by virtue of helping his friends. In later adolescence, after character is pretty well formed, strong and close friendships are doubtless valuable. To have a friend that one is willing to fight for, and, if necessary, die for, puts new meaning into life and makes it worth living. Then, in summary, children should not have their association narrowed to any one child, but in later adolescence, when char- acter begins to crystallise, much good may come from close associations, but even then the rest of the world must not be shut out. Gangs and clubs. — Boys' clubs, their dangers and possibilities, assume a large importance at the pres- ent time. Eiis, Forbush and Jane Addams have made us familiar with these problems. A census taken by the author of about 100 students in a certain class revealed the fact that most of them had been members of a club. These students were asked to give the effects, bad and good,that come from belong- ing to these clubs and gangs. The good points men- tioned were: (1) social training; (2) literary train- ing; (3) skill in sewing, painting, etc.; (4) gives an understanding of human nature; (5) gives high ideals; (6) good effects from being kept out-of- doors; (7) friendships formed; (8) sympathies broadened; (9) leadership and self-reliance taught by the club or gang. The bad effects mentioned were such as the following: (1) narrowing; (2) make THE SOCIAL INSTINCTS 65 members snobbish; (3) make members clannish; (4) teach bad code of ethics; (5) teach law-breaking; (6) lead to quarreling and make enemies. Many of these, bad as well as good, were due to the special object or nature of the particular club. The gang instinct is strong, and it is evident that if it could be allowed to manifest itself, with the evil influences lopped off, a great gain would thereby be effected for education. And a study of the bad influ- ences leads to the conclusion that they may, in part at least, be avoided. At a certain age the formation of clubs and gangs seems to be a very natural thing for boys and girls to do, and this natural tendency ought to be taken advantage of if possible in the in- terest of education. It should be made to help in the education of youth, instead of allowed to be a hin- drance. This, of course, may be said in regard to all natural tendencies, — they must be utilised in the scheme of education, if it is at all possible. When this is not possible, and we are sure that the educa- tion itself is not wrong, then the tendency should in most cases be killed, allowed to die for want of exer- cise. The spirit of the club should be spontaneous, but older people can direct the purpose of the club and the gang instinct can be aligned with other instincts, particularly with the play, the collecting and the migratory instincts. Young people do not resent the interference of elders if the elders are in sympathy with youth. Every club can have its adviser and its whole influence can be directed toward good and the natural development of the members. But great tact and good judgment are needed on the part of those 66 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY who would advise or direct boys' clubs. Boys are active and need to lead a vigorous, athletic, out-of- door life. They do not care to belong to a club for the suppression of noise or for the establishment of a New England Sabbath, or even for the study of Shakespeare. Nor do they wish as advisers weak women or 'sissy' men. Boys are boys and must lead a boy's life; the more vigorous, the better for the boy. They are naturally suspicious of the kind old deacon who wishes to "do them good." He usually wishes to make old men out of them seventy years too early. The kind of club that they prefer is such that calls into activity the deepest, strongest forces of their nature, — fishing club, hunting club, camping club, athletic club, naturalist's club, all of which pro- vide for great activity, and which usually take them out-of-doors and give opportunity for an active life. And he who would be an adviser of boys must be a boy himself. He may be seventy years old, but the spirit of youth must be in him. Why gangs are formed. — In our large cities gangs are numerous, almost one to every block. The reason for this unusual manifestation of the gang spirit is pretty clear. The gang, in its present form, is one of the products of our modern society, the outgrowth of modern social development. Under more primi- tive conditions, the child's natural desire for social activity was well provided for in the ordinary work and play with brothers and sisters and also with neighbors. The modern city child has no work and not the right kind of play, — free, outdoor romping and running, chasing, and exploring wood and stream. That the modern school does not fully pro- THE SOCIAL INSTINCTS 67 vide for the social instincts shows that it is not en- tirely the right kind of school. The school room has been a sort of jail, where children, although phys- ically in proximity, were socially isolated. Mutual help and free intercourse among the children — the perfectly natural thing — have for the most part been forbidden. Although the development of the social instincts is one of the greatest possibilities of the school, this one thing it has largely failed to do, and, instead, has turned their training over to the streets. The possibilities of organising the school as a club to provide properly for the social needs of the chil- dren have hardly been dreamed of. A number of children forming a room or grade should be a unit for doing all the things that the children ought to do. Now it should be a nature study club for the finding out of all the wonders of the wide out-of-doors, now a debating club, now an athletic club, now a picnic club, and so on. In a word, the school should supply all the needs of the child, at least all those not sup- plied by the home. In the school the child should find full scope for all activities. The traditional school can not do this. Its scope and function and form of procedure must be greatly enlarged. It is a great mistake to make the school stationary. The world can not be brought into a school room, neither can child-development best go on there. The school should be a social unit, but should do its work wher- ever that work can best be done. If a part of the world can not be brought into the school room, then the child should be taken to it. As a nature study club, the school should explore the natural environ- ment, and as a civic club it should study the civic and 68 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY social environment. This does not mean that the school should be called a club for this or that, but that it should perform these social functions. The education of the child should be controlled by the school and the home. The movements outside of school to organise children are dangerous. The whole training and education of the child should be unified and under the control of professional teach- ers scientifically trained for their work. If there is a part of child-nature that the school and home are not taking care of, then they must enlarge their sphere. And it is the contention here that the school organisation should provide for all the social needs of the children that are not taken care of by the home. Another reason for the modern street gang is the disappearance of home-life. The child in the rural community that has plenty of work and play at home with brothers and sisters and parents has most of the needs of his nature satisfied. The city child, as already mentioned, has no work and no proper play. He can not work alongside of his parents, for they are away from home at the factory; therefore the child must go to the street and join the gang when he is not in an unsocial school room vigilantly watched by a teacher whom he too often considers a taskmaster and an enemy. We are aware that these conditions are not universal and are far from be- lieving that they are necessary. The school can be so organised as to make other forms of organisation both unnecessary and impossible. To this end, parks and playgrounds can be much extended and the na- ture and function of the school much changed. And a thing very much to be desired is the revival of THE SOCIAL INSTINCTS 69 home-life. The modern parent does not live with his children nearly as much as he should and can. The family fireside must be revived, although around the radiator. Parents must live much more with their children and enter much more into their activities. This will solve a large part of the difficulty and ren- der the necessity of the gang not nearly so great. For the gang is not solely a manifestation of the gang instinct, but a means of providing for a number of activities and interests not properly provided for. If the home and school provide for these needs, the street gang will not be a necessity for the child. The worst influences of the gang are seen in the largest cities, where so many aspects of the child's life are neglected and where family life has suffered most decay. High school fraternities. — Probably worse than the gang of the city street is the high school fraternity, opposing the best interests of the school and of democracy itself, and by imitating the social activi- ties of adults, ripening the sexual instincts prema- turely, and forming habits of dissipation, snobbish- ness, extravagance and idleness. But that within the school itself an organisation should be formed to provide for the socialistic instincts is the very best proof that the school is not fulfilling its function in this respect, although it must be recognised that many influences are at work to produce the school fraternity. The boy who must hurry home from school to use the bucksaw, shovel, ax or hoe, and who spends the evening around the family fireside read- ing and talking with parents and brothers and sis- ters, is receiving a much better training for citizen- 70 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY ship and manhood than the city boy who belongs to a fraternity and spends much of his time outside of the school and family. A boy's best club should be the family circle and his best chum should be his father; even the school should be secondary and supplementary. Sympathy and co-operation. — If the modern school should make greater demands upon the instinctive tendencies connected with the emotion of sympathy, with co-operation and altruism, and somewhat less upon the individualistic instincts, it would strengthen these late and weak tendencies and be better for our modern society. There is no reason why the school should not be a training in social service and co- operation. The idea should be to bring out the best in each individual for the good of the whole, and each child should learn to do what he can do best. The children in school, therefore, should act much as do children in the home, mutually helping one another, and should early learn that the welfare of each is dependent upon the welfare of the whole, while the welfare of the group depends upon each one's doing his best. Children can not be prepared for social and civic duties without conscious and directed training. These facts do not mean that the formal aspect of a club is necessary, nor do they mean that a school is to be transformed into a mob, or into a George Junior or Senior Eepublic, or any other of the numerous fads proposed every day. The school must always be much of a monarchy, just as the home should also be, but a monarchy whose ruler is wise and benevolent and who rules only because the subjects are not wise enoiift'li to rule themselves, and THE SOCIAL INSTINCTS 71 whose rule is the best sort of preparation for self- government. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOE FTTUTHEIl STUDY. 1. Write up the history of your owu experieuce with chums and point out the effects, good and bad. 2. Study the members of some family with the purpose of deter- mining whether there is any difference in the degree of social- isation, comparing the older with the younger. In a similar way make a study of as many children as possible that are only chil- dren, and determine whether there is any uniformity in their variation from the average child that is reared in a larger family. A good procedure would be to deteruiine the characteristics of '60 only children, then determine the characteristics of 50 children, chosen at random, that are members of larger families. 3. If the parents are careful and wise, and the only child has plenty of playmates, can it become as well socialised as the child of a larger family? 4. If the first part of one's life is largely spent in solitude, are the social instincts likely to be much developed? Do you know of such a case? 5. What part does imitation of elders play in the formation of clubs and gangs by young people? 6. Do you know anyone who is individualistic and solitary in his habits? If you know of such a case, can you explain it? Can you cite the case of a child whose selfish nature is being allowed to develop at the expense of the social nature? 7. In a family of several children, do you think that either child has any advantage as far as the development of the social instincts is concerned? Make careful observations with this point in mind. 8. Make a study of pupil self-government to see if it fosters the development of the social nature. Read a description of the meth- ods used in the George Junior Republic. (See the references.) 9. Would it be well for children to have perfect liberty to help one another in the schoolroom? 10. Do twins make good chums for each other, or are they too much alike? 11. Are country children as likely to form gangs and clubs as are city children? 12. If plenty of social activity is provided, do we still have the club and gang? 13. How can parents prevent the necessity of clubs and gangs? 14. How should a teacher deal with a spoilt child — one that is selfish and has not been properly socialised? 15. In the process of socialisation, by measuring himself up with his fellows, a person may discover that he is inferior in some re- spects. Is this discovery a good thing for him? 72 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 16. Would many parks in a city help to lessen the evil effects of gangs? 17. In what way can education properly utilize the gang instinct? 18. Make a study of some cases of chumming and close friend- ships and try to determine the cause of the mutual attraction. What is the basis of your attraction to your best friends? 19. Show the necessity of co-operation and sympathy in mod- ern social life. 20. Show that, from the point of view taken in the first chapter, a part of the function of the school is the proper socialisation of the pupils. Show how the school does this work ; how it could do it better. 21. Show what a great character in a community is the man or woman who shows the most earnest and real co-operation and sympathy. Note that there are always characters that assume such a role, but do not possess the virtue. 22. Are chums likely to sink to the lowest that is in them, or rise to the best? What can you say about gangs in this respect? 23. Show that Dewey's scheme of education as outlined in School and Society takes proper account of social instincts. Have you any criticism of the scheme? 24. Enumerate all the changes in the schools necessary to make them take proper account of the socialistic instincts. 25. Try to discover the rules of boys' gangs. Does your study throw any light on the nature of boys and their proper training? 2G. Indicate various attempts of the present time to organize young people. Show that all this work is properly the work of the school. 27. If you are, or ever have been, a member of a fraternity, enumerate its benefits and disadvantages. Is it possible to remove the disadvantages, or are they inherent in the nature of a frater- nity? Is the same thing true of both the high school and univer- sity fraternities? BEFEBENCES. The gregarious instinct, clubs, gangs, etc., E. A, Kirkpatrick, FundumentaU of Child Study, p. 118; G. S. Hall, Adolescence, Vol. ii, Ch. XV ; also in Youth, p. 207; also, Some Social Aspects of Edu- cation, in Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. ix, p. 81 ; H. D. Sheldon, Am. Jour. Psych., Vol. ix, 425; W. B, Forbush, Pedagogical Semi- nary, Vol. vii, p. 307; also Vol. xvi, p. 337; also The Boy Problem, 1901, Chs. ii and iii ; \Y. Buck, Boys' Self -Governing Clubs, 1903; J. A. Riis. The Children of the Poor, 1892, Ch. xiii ; also on The Genesis of the Gang, A Ten Yeais' War, 1900, Ch. v, and Battle tvith the Slum, 1902, Ch. ix ; Jane Addams, The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets, 1909; also Democracy and Social Ethics, 1907; M. V. O'Shea, Social Development and Education, 1909, Chs. xi and xiii; J. Dewey, The School and Society. 1900, gives some idea of what a socialized education would be like; on the George Junior Republic see George Junior Repuhlic, Nothing Without THE SOCIAL INSTINCTS 73 Labor, 1910; W. R. George, TJie Junior Republic, 1910; also J. E. Guuckel, BoyviUe, 1905, shows what adult direction can accom- plish with the boys of the city ; J. W. L. Jones, Sociality and Sym- pathy, Psych. Rev. Mon. Sup., Vol. v, No. 1. On Chums, see F. G. Bonser, Fed. Sem., Vol. ix, 221. On the Only Child in a Family, see Bohaunon, Ped. Setn., Vol. V, p. 475. The parental and sexual instincts are not treated in this book, but the subject is of great importance to the teacher. The following references will be found helpful : P. Geddes and J. A. Thompson, The Evolution of Sex, 1890; C. R. Henderson, Education with, Reference to Sex, 1909; M. B. Williams, Sex Prohlems, 1910; G. S. Hall, Adolescence, Vol. ii, Ch. xi ; also Educational Prohlems, Vol. i, Ch. vii, and Vol. ii, Ch. ix. Chaptee VII. THE ENVIEONMENTAL INSTINCTS. The Migeatoky Instinct. The migrations of lower animals. — The migrations of seals will well illustrate this instinct. At a certain season of the year the seals leave the Alaskan islands and go southward in the Pacific ocean for hundreds and even thousands of miles. They stay south dur- ing the fall and winter, and return in the spring to the northern islands to breed. The dates of their return to the breeding islands show remarkable reg- ularity. Changes in the environment — the seasonal changes — and changes in the seal's body itself serve as the stimulii to start it off on its long journey. Back and forth it goes, year after year, with clock- like regularity. The past life and experience of the seal has left its body with such an inherited neuro- muscular structure, — with co-ordinations ready formed, — that the conditions of its existence send it forth on its annual circuit to the south to feed, and back again to the northern islands to breed. No less interesting is the case of the salmon. At a certain season of the year the Columbia river is literally alive with these fish. With head turned up-stream, irresistibly and with the blind determination of fatal- ism, they make their way to the gravel and sand of the head-waters of the Columbia to spawn. Not a [74] THE ENVIKONMENTAL, INSTINCTS 75 bite of food do they take, but steadily go on, leaping the falls and rapids, till they reach the shallow waters, their bodies being much the worse for wear. After reaching this destination, they deposit their eggs, and drift down stream, tail first, to die. The young hatch and slowly make their way down stream to the ocean, where they live for a few years, grow- ing to considerable size, and finally seek the river's mouth and go up-stream to spawn and die, repeating the life-circuit. This is even more remarkable than is the migration of the seal, for it is conceivable that in the case of the seal the young could follow the old ones and learn the habit of migration. But with the salmon this is not possible, for the young are not accompanied down stream by the old fish. Each host of salmon is a new crop, and in its migration to and from the sea can be responding only to a blind im- pulse. Quite similar to the migrations of the seals is that of the birds. In the fall the birds come to- gether, often in great flocks, and soon start south for the southern states, Mexico, and even Central and South America, where they spend the winter. As the northern spring comes on, the birds start north again and go to their old nesting places with considerable regularity, the time varying somewhat with the con- dition of the weather. Sometimes they return to the same tree, and even to the same nest, after journey- ing, in some cases, for many thousands of miles. What has brought about this wonderful phenomenon of migration in many animals? The answer to this question for any particular species of animal is to be found in the past history of the species and of its environment. All surviving animals are delicately 76 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY adjusted to tlie conditions of their surroundings. These conditions are seasonal and climatic changes and changes of the food supply. Experiments have confirmed the idea of the close relations that animals have to the conditions of their surroundings. To give one illustration: tadpoles confined in a vessel can be made to migrate by varying the temperature of the water. By heating the water at one place and keeping it cool elsewhere, the tadpoles are made to go to that place in the vessel of water whose tempera- ture suits them best. Certain temperatures and defi- nite conditions as regards the other factors of the environment are most favorable for the growth and life of every species. Migrations in response to seasonal and climatic changes, and varying conditions of food-supply, have doubtless been as important a factor in the past life of man as with lower animals. It seems quite likely that man has passed through various stages of exist- ence as regards food, such as fruit-eating, fishing and hunting. Granting that this is the case, then it would follow that migration has played an important role in his past life. Man has doubtless had a most deli- cate relation and adjustment to forest and stream, hill and valley, to changing seasons, to day and night, and perhaps even to the varying phases of the moon. If the generally accepted tlieory of man's origin and development is correct, we should naturally expect that his long apprenticeship to these rhythmical changes of nature would leave some remnant or trace in his organism. Moreover, nearly all history begins with vague legends and traditions of migrations. Back of the history of Greece and Italy and England THE ENVIEONMENTAL INSTINCTS 77 is migration. Great migrations of the American In- dians are well established. But we have much more than analogy and specula- tion on whicli to base a theory of a human migratory instinct. A careful study of childhood and youth, a study of such phenomena as truancies and runa- ways, and atavistic, roving tendencies in many adults, shows beyond question the traces of impulses to rove, old in racial history, still existing in man. Of course, man's condition for some time has been predominantly sessile. The lengthening period of infancy, necessitating family life, has made more and more for stability and permanency of abode, and weakened the wandering and migrating tendencies, causing man to move only when the environing pres- sure became extreme. Man has built him a home, and social influences and the necessities of rearing the children have kept him and wife and children there. But when social influences are weak and the condi- tions favoring roving or moving are strong, either parent may leave the home, and especially likely to go are the children. So, although the migratory im- pulse is subdued and controlled by social and pa- rental influences, certain conditions unfavorable to home life may make it possible for the instinctive tendency to become operative, and sometimes active for life. In the Gypsies, the roving instinct is a prom- inent factor of life. Tramps and '^hoboes" travel about all their life under control of the blind impulse to move. It seems, then, that in childhood and youth there appears a genuine, inherited tendency to mi- grate, to move about and see and explore other places, but that favorable home conditions overcome 78 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY this impulse ordinarily. And, on the other hand, unfavorable home and school conditions, and possi- bly other factors, may produce truancies and runa- ways that seem truly instinctive in nature, and in some cases a roving life thus begun is continued and the individual is never afterward content to re- main long in one place. Tliis roving disposition looks very much like a condition of atavism or rever- sion. Almost every community has its ''gad-abouts," both women and men. There are men who stay with their families but a short time, then go away. Often they return after irregular intervals, with a deter- mination to stay at home, but it is not for long, for off they go again. Truancies and runaways. — Truancies and runa- ways take place most frequently in the spring and summer. This, a priori, is to be expected, if the the- ory of the migratory instinct set forth above is cor- rect. The spring must always have been an impor- tant period of migration for primitive man after a more or less enforced life in one place during the winter. It is well known that the American Indian broke camp and set forth in the spring on warring and hunting expeditions. Most i)eople of our own race, with the approach of spring, feel the impulse to move, to go anywhere to get out of the house. Then, too, don't we have our annual migration when we move every spring into another house? At any rate, whatever be the explanation, most truancies occur in the spring. As soon as children are able to walk and get out of doors, they run away, blindly going on and on, neither knowing nor caring whither, but greatly en- THE ENVIKONMENTAL INSTINCTS 79 joying the going. It takes, however, only a little care to break this early tendency to explore the world and to fix fairly well the habit of staying close to the house. But, easy as it is, some parents allow the matter to trouble them for years, when perhaps the proper use of a little switch would, at the beginning, set the matter right. In later childhood and early youth the tendency to run away comes in different and much stronger form. In the years just preced- ing adolescence, and during the early years of ado- lescence, there are many cases of both truancy and runaway. If the tendency is not checked and sub- dued in early adolescence, there is much danger of permanent roving tendencies. There is, perhaps, considerable danger in allowing a person, even in later adolescence, to see too much of the world before home ties and domestic habits have become quite strong. We are told by students of this subject that during the years of eight to twelve the roving instinct is either subdued or becomes a life-long tendency, as a rule. The rover may become a life-time tramp; sometimes he drifts into a life of crime. The danger of this is very great, for the man who is here today and somewhere else tomorrow does not feel the same respect for social custom, for life and property, as does the permanent member of a community. Some- times the rover marries and attempts to live a settled life, with the result already mentioned, — he period- ically leaves home, — sometimes, however, he does not leave, but continues to move with his whole family several times a year. Causes of Truancies. — From wKat has been said about the nature of truancy, it is evident that any- 80 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY thing which works against the social influence of the school and home may serve to call the migratory instinct into being. Among these are: (1) the desire to work and play out-of-doors; (2) the dislike of school; (3) dislike of the teacher; (4) impatience of restraint, i. e., a desire for free activity; (5) a vague discontent with the school and home surroundings and a blind desire to see and try other places. One's life is new and the world is new, and one wishes to go forth and try the new life in the great new world. This cause doubtless operates in the spring after the children have been in school all the winter. The work has become monotonous and irksome, the body is somewhat weakened by continued study and not enough exercise, the school loses its charm and the world outside calls loudly. The desire to get out and run away is then strong and unreasonable, and cer- tainly appears to have the nature of a blind instinct. Unless school and home conditions are pretty favor- able, many boys now play truant or run away. The dislike of the school and of the teacher de- serves more extended treatment. The dislike of school may be due to inability to do the work of the school well. And this, in turn, may be due to sensory de- fects, to poor nutrition, some other bodily defect, to poor adaptation to the grade of work required. But it matters not what the cause may be, if the child is unable to do the work, he will not like the school very long. Another cause is dislike for the hind of work required. The work may make demands on activities that are not functioning at the time, that have not yet appeared, and may leave unappealed to, functions that are demanding activity. It is said that pupils seldom THE ENVIRONMENTAL. INSTINCTS 81 run away from manual training schools. And as re- gards the teacher, whatever the nature of the work, there will not be very great love for school if the teacher himself is not attractive. School, and some- times the home, present too much the aspect of a prison. The child runs away from the prisons in his desire for free activity. Certain anthropological and sociological consid- erations throw much light on the cause of truancy. It is found that truants are not so tall, not so heavy, not so strong, not so well developed physically as the average person of the same age. Most truants are the oldest, youngest or the only child, — the child not so well socialised. Some 65% of truants have incom- plete homes. Poor home influence and poor heredity both make for weak social forces which allow the more primitive instincts to come forth. When poor home influences coincide with bad school conditions, then truancies and runaways may be expected, while if only one of these conditions exists, truancies ought not to be so likely to occur. The school and the migratory instinct. — There are two possibilities of taking account of the instinct by education: (1) The child's natural desire to see and explore and travel should be in part gratified by the school and home. The curriculum and the methods of teaching should both make considerable demand for out-door work, done both formally and in- formally. Most of the world is outside of the school room. Education endeavors to acquaint the child with the world. The railroad, the steam engine, the automobile, the factory and workshop, the rivers, hills and mountains, the birds and squirrels and bugs and 82 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY bees and flowers, the city hall and the court house and the governor's mansion, — are all outside of the school house, as are also the various and raanifold activities of man. Not only should the study of these things take the child out-of-doors, but the material that is furnished by the out-of-door study should constitute much of the subject-matter that occupies the children while within the school room. To illus- trate : The study of geography should involve mak- ing a complete exploration of the locality, charting its various geographical features, such as streams and hills, forests, etc. The processes of land-forma- tion and of erosion should be studied first-hand. This work should make the children explorers and would go a long way toward satisfying the desire to get out of the school house and rove. The study of the fauna and flora of the locality would also furnish opportu- nity for much out-door work and would in every way be a splendid thing for the children, satisfying many needs of their natures. Within limits, then, educa- tion can and should satisfy the demands of whatever instinctive desire to rove and explore the children may have. (2) The school and the home should have their social aspects made of such a nature and strength that the children will have little desire for any more extended migrations than those provided for by the school and home. The school and home should be the center around which the child revolves, but should exert such a strong pull upon him that he will not leave liis orbit, comet-like, perhaps never to return. In other words, if the school and home sat- isfy the normal needs of the child, there need not be much fear that it will run away from either. the environmental instincts 83 The Collecting Instinct. Its universality. — Statistical studies show that practically all children make collections at some time in early life. Doubtless imitation and suggestion can account for many of the facts, and still other of the facts might be referred to certain of the individual- istic instincts. But such studies of the subject as have been made make it appear that the universality of the phenomena can not be adequately explained except on the ground of a specific instinct. Children from a very early age show a disposition to lay their hands on everything that attracts their attention and to take it home, — such things as pebbles, sticks, leaves, acorns, bright pieces of metal, colored paper, cloth and strings, — anything that attracts the atten- tion. The objects are not taken with any end in view — at least are not at first — and often very little attention is paid to the objects afterward. It looks very much like the remnant of an instinct to appro- priate everything loose that could possibly be of any service. The impulse is not only apparently univer- sal, but is pretty strong. The fact that as many as five collections have been found to be made on an average by the children of a public school shows that much energy is expended in making these collections- Development of the instinct.— Children make col- lections as early as the age of three. The impulse to collect increases in strength till the age of eleven, when it reaches a maximum, and from about the age of fourteen there is a decline. Up to the age of eight the impulse is crude and groping, undirected by any motive, but from the age of eight on. the impulse de- 84 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY velops into a genuine interest. In some cases it becomes a strong passion, superseding nearly all other interests. At first there seems to be little inter- est in the things themselves that are collected; the phenomena are those of a blind, groping instinct. Later, the objects collected assume to their possessor great value, whether they be worthless, cancelled stamps or Indian arrowheads. Each individual ob- ject is carefully preserved, and often the possessor would not sell his collection for any price. Every conceivable kind of thing is collected; nat- ural objects, however, rank highest. Of course, imi- tation has much to do with determining the kind of thing collected. The specialisation of the object that calls forth the response of collecting is in harmony with the general fact of the specialisation of stimulus that has already been mentioned. A particular kind of thing, or a particular range of things, calls forth the response to the exclusion of other kinds of ob- jects. Many of the phenomeua here doubtless fall within the realm of habit, but there seems to be a natural tendency back of the habits. In the earlier stages of the instinct little arrange- ment is to be found in the collections, little classifica- tion. The collectors are naturalists rather than scientists. The objects are merely heaped to- gether, often in a heterogeneous mass, sometimes not got together at all, merely left around about the house ; but later much skill and interest are shown in arranging and classifying the objects. Pedagogy of the collecting instinct. — Education could profit greatly by making large demands upon the collecting instinct. It seems clear that early THE ENVIEONMENTAL INSTINCTS 85 childhood is the time to send children forth to the fields and woods, to study what they find there and to gather specimens. The children can form nat- uralists' clubs for the purpose of studying the nat- ural environment. Such study should embrace rocks, soils, plants with their leaves, flowers, fruits and specimens of the wood of the various trees. Birds and insects can be studied and collections made of each species. The work of such a club would have a twofold value. (1) The study and collecting acquaint the child with his natural environment, and in doing it afford a sphere for the activity of many aspects of his nature. They take him out-of-doors and give an opportunity for exploring every nook and corner of the natural environment. The collecting can often be done in such a way as to appeal to the group in- stincts. For instance, the club could hold meetings for exhibiting and studying the specimens, and some- times the actual collecting might be done by children in groups. (2) The specimens collected should be put into the school museum, and the aim of this museum should be to represent completely the local environment, the natural and physical environment, and also the industrial, civil and social environment. The museum should be completely illustrative of the child's natural, physical and social environment. The museum, therefore, would be educative in its making, and when it is made it would have immense value to the community, not only to the children, but to the whole people. In this museum, of course, should be found the minerals, rocks, soils, insects — particularly those economically important — birds, especially those of any economic importance, and 86 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIOISIAL PSYCHOLOGY also specimens of all the wild animals of the locality. If proper appeal is made to the natural desire of the children to make collections, this instinct would soon be made of service in producing a very valuable col- lection. The school museum in which they are placed should also include other classes of specimens. There should be specimens showing industrial evolu- tion, the stages of manufacture of the raw material of the locality, specimens of local historical interest, pictures, documents, books. The room in which these specimens are housed should be at least as large as the regular school room. The nmseum and a smaller room for a work shop should be most important parts of the school building. In rural communities, perhaps in all communities, the school building should be the center of interest and activity for all the people of the community. When we add to the museum a library, not only for the children, but for the old people as well, we have a pretty good idea of what ought to be in a school house. The school should stand for the interests of the community and should represent them. It could be made of such a nature that the parents would go there nearly as often as do the children. The school should be for the instruction of all the people of the community. It should be the experiment station, the library, the debating club, the art gallery, for the whole commu- nity, and should crystallise the life of the community and unify it. Of course, the man who runs the school should Imow and represent the community life; he should be a man capable of giving advice to the peo- ple of the community concerning the things that they THE ENVIRONMENTAL INSTINCTS. 87 must do and the life that they must live. lu the farm- ing communities he should know more about farm- ing than any one else in the community. This ideal school is not all to grow out of the collecting instinct, but this instinct and the museum that is to come from it would be important factors in making such a school. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOE rURTHER STUDY. The Migratory Instinct. 1. Make a complete study of a case of chronic truancy, consider- ing it from every point of view. Discover tlie boy's natural desires and inclinations ; inquire carefully into home conditions and hered- itary influences. Are both parents living? Bo they live together? What is the boy's position in the family, i. e., is he an only child, youngest child, oldest child? Hovp^ large is the family? What are the school conditions? How does the boy get on with his studies, with the other pupils, with his teacher? 2. Can you find a case of truancy in which the home and school conditions are good and the child does well with his studies? If you can find such a case, is there an explanation for it in the ex- cessive migratory impulses of the child? 3. Did you ever 'play' truant or run away from home yourself? If so, what were the causes and consequences? 4. Make a study of as many cases of truancy as possible to determine whether the truants have any natural traits in common. For example, do they love the woods and streams? Do they like to hunt or fish? Are they more interested in objects of nature than the average child? Do they know more about what is doing in the world, more about machinery, etc., than the average child? 5. When you have the opportunity, make a study of the an- thropological aspects of truants, comparing their height, weight, vital capacity, etc., with those of normal children. 6. Similarly make a psychological study of truants, comparing their various mental functions with those of normal children, tak- ing such functions as memory, attention, learning capacity. 7. How should a teacher deal with truancy? How should par- ents deal with it? Are temporary measures, such as punishment, of any use? Rather, should teachers and parents try to discover the fundamental causes and remove the causes if possible? Can you cite a case in which it was apparently Impossible to remove the causes? 88 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. 8. Is it strange that some children should find it hard to recon- cile themselres to the schoolroom, when we consider how different the confinement, repression, restrictions and work of the school- room are from the primitive conditions of child life? 9. Read the first chapter in Swift's Mind in the Making to see If it throws any light on the causes of truancy. The essential point to consider is that many of the great men of modern times found the work of the school poorly fitted to their needs and de- sires. 10. To what extent are the schools themselves responsible for truancy? 11. Suggest changes in the curriculum and methods of the school that would reduce the number of cases of truancy. 12. How can the school utilize the migratory impulses of the children? 13. Why do girls seldom 'play' truant? Did you ever know of a girl running away from school or from home? If you know of a case, describe the circumstances. 14. Is there any connection between truancies and the modern street gang? 15. If it is ever possible for you to do so, collect the data for truancies in a large city and find their distribution for the months and seasons. 16. Are there more cases of truancy in the city in proportion to population than in the country? 17. In a case of truancy resulting from a poorly-nourished body, what is the teacher to do? 18. Can you find any evidence of truancy 'nuining in a family'? If so, are there any other characteristic traits in the family? 19. Do you know of a man or woman who seems to have re- tained the migratory impulse? If so, write an account of the case. 20. Collect data to show where truants go when they run away from school. 21. If a large amount of time is taken to study the social and natural world out of doors, will there be time enough left for jn'ac- tice and drill in arithmetic, writing, spelling, language, literature, etc., in the schoolroom? 22. Which is the more important factor in the production of the American 'hobo' or tramp, the migratory instinct or our social conditions? 23. Suppose a boy should run away from home. How should the matter be treated by the parents? What do you think of the plan of paying no attention to the runaway for a time in the hope that he might have such a bitter experience that he would not care to repeat It? THE ENVIKONMENTAL INSTINCTS. 89 The Collecting Instinct. 1. If you ever made a collection, write an account of It. What did you collect? What was the motive? What did you do with the things collected? How many collections have you made? How old were you when you made them? 2. Outline a plan of school work for the utilisation of the col- lecting instinct. 3. Make a list of the things that children in the rural schools can collect ; make another list of the things that could be collected by city children. 4. Point out the different ways in which education could proflt from excursions to make collections and from the material col- lected. Show that the gang instinct, the migratory and the collect- ing instincts would be called into play ; show also that the material and experience would be available in many subjects. 5. Outline a plan for a school museum in a rural community. Include in your plan the material for the museum and its arrange- ment. 6. Will a competent teacher, who has a little tact and common sense, have any trouble in convincing his patrons of the value of the kind of work suggested in the chapter? Of course, it is neces- sary to begin in a small way and let the value of the work become evident before requests are made for equipment. And equipment, after all, is not of very great importance. The greatest part of the required equipment is knowledge and enthusiasm on the part of the teacher. 7. Point out the value to a community of having in the school building a complete collection of the insects of economic impor- tance in the locality, and the value of having in the library scien- tific literature on the life histories of these insects. Show that this is in harmony with the idea of education given in the first chapter. 8. Do you think a complete collection of the birds of the locality would be of value? Or, rather, should the knowledge of birds come from field study? 9. Do you think it would be a proper work of the school to organize exploring parties and expeditions for the purpose of getting geological, geographical, botanical and zoological knowledge and specimens? 10. Would it be a loss of time for high-school boys to spend a week at such work, camping out in primitive fashion? Is it not possible that we have too narrow a view of the nature and function of the school? REFERENCES. TJi« Migratory Instinct. E. A. Kirkpatrick, Fundamentals of Child Study, p. 213; L. W. Kline, in Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. v, p. 381 ; A7ncrican Jour- nal of Psychology, Vol. x, p. 60; W. K. Brooks, in Popular 90 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. Science Monthly, Vol. lii, p. 784 ; G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, 1904, Vol. ii, p. 375 ; Vol. i, p. 348 ; M. V. O'Shea, Social Devel- opment and Education, 1909, p. 151, a mere statement that the majority of pupils in school would be truants if they dared to be; Psychological Clinic, Vol. i, p. 21, for a description of a typical ease of truancy ; L. P. Ayres, in Psychological Clinic, Vol. iii, p. 1, on the relation of irregular attendance to poor work and elimination from school. The Collecting Instinct. Kirkpatrick, Fundamentals of Child Study, p. 205; G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Vol. ii, p. 484; C. F. Burk, in Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. vii, p. 179; E. Barnes, Studies in Education, 1896-1902, Vol. i, p. 144. Chapter VIII. THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS— PLAY. 1. Physiological considerations. — (1) Relation of muscle activity to brain activity. One-third to one-half of the brain surface has motor functions, together with other functions. Of course, in a sense, every part of the brain has motor functions, for every part is an interpolation between stimulus and response. But just as there are large areas more directly concerned with sensation, so there are large areas more directly concerned with the initiation of muscular contraction. It is significant that so large a part of the brain is concerned with motion. (2) Muscular exercise and brain activity. Of the motor areas above mentioned, certain parts are directly concerned with the movement of definite groups of muscles, and for these brain centers to develop, the exercise of these groups of muscles is necessary. If, for any reason, a group of muscles can not perform its proper function of contraction, the corresponding centers will not have their proper development. The necessity of co-ordinating muscular movement, with- out doubt, gave rise to the origin and development of these centers, in the first place, in species develop- ment. So, in the individual, the proper development of the motor centers is dependent upon muscular de- velopment. The biological experience of our species [91] 92 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. has fixed in the organism certain necessities of indi- vidual development which cannot be ignored. (3) Loss of body parts. A person losing a limb in early life will lack development in that part of the brain controlling that limb. This, of course, is but a special case of tho fact just discussed, and both may have their truth more generally expressed in (4) Brain development and exercise. Not only does each group of muscles have its corresponding brain cen- ter dependent upon it, but the development of the brain as a whole is dependent upon the richness and fullness of muscular activity. The biological func- tion of the brain is the co-ordination of muscular activities ivith one another and ivith sensory stimu- lation, {b) Muscular adjustment. Muscular co-ordi- nation and adjustment are more important for brain development than is mere muscular strength. The greater the variability and complexity of muscular movement, the greater the demands upon the co-ordi- nating centers, and, therefore, the greater their de- velopment. It therefore follows that the kind of work and of play that is best for development is not that which calls for mere monotonous repetition of acts, but that which calls for change and demands the meeting of new situations. We shall learn later that mere, lifeless repetition has no place anywhere in education, not even in drill for the fixing of me- chanical operations. (6) Later psychic life related to early muscular activity. The extent and range of later psychic life are dependent, in large measure, upon the extent and complexity of the neuro-muscu- lar activity of early life ; i. e., varied and extensive muscular activity in early life means, other things THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — PLAT. 93 being equal, rich psychic life later. The bright child is active, always doing, always contriving; the dull child is slow, uncertain and without initiative. Mus- cular activity and mentality are clearly bound up together and are mutually dependent. It need not be said that muscular activity is a cause of mentality, but it certainly is a necessary condition of mental development. That an individual may reach normal maturity it certainly is necessary for that individual to pass through a childhood and a youth of almost infinitely varied and increasing activity. So close is this interdependence that the early mental develop- ment of a child is much affected by the amount of at- tention given it, the amount of handling in infancy and the opportunity afforded it for play and exercise. (7) The will, the feelings and the muscles. Accord- ing to James, even feeling and will are intimately re- lated to muscle activity and development. A large part of feeling, if not all of it, is due to the muscular response of the body accompanying sensation and ideation. Many of the finer feelings seem dependent upon the facial and other muscles of expression. The crude and unskilled laborer who habitually uses but the larger muscles, and is incapable of fine muscular co-ordination, seems also incapable of experiencing the finer shades of emotion. And there is probably much truth in the popular notion of the relation of weak will to flabby muscles. The man who is always doing is the man who can do, and the man who never does anything is the man who can not do. Although what we call strong and weak wills are largely mat- ters of habit, there is probably some basis for them in the muscular system. A life of continued activity 94 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. makes further activity possible and easy, and a life of inactivity tends to make activity impossible. These physiological facts make it certain that mus- cular activity and nervous organisation and develop- ment are closely related, and since mental develop- ment is dependent upon nervous development, it is therefore related to muscular activity. Definitions and theories. — (1) Psychologically, play can not be distinguished from other forms of pleasurable action. It is always pleasurable, but work may also be pleasurable. Play is an activity performed for its own sake or the pleasure accom- panying it, and for no other end, while work may be defined as an activity performed not for the sake of the act itself, but for the sake of some other end that is to grow out of the act. One plays ball for the fun there is in it, while one plows and tills the soil, not for the fun there is in the work, but for the sake of the grain that is to grow for his food. If one plays ball merely because there is felt the need of exercise, then playing ball is work, while, on the other hand, the tilling of the soil may take on the aspect of play if the work is done for its own sake and not for the fruits of the labor. From this common-sense point of view, then, we may say that when an action is per- formed for some other end than itself, it may be called luork; when for its own sake, play. But this distinction of purpose between work and play is not a psychological one. Psychologically, all we can say is that play is one of the highly pleasurable forms of action. "We may also say, however, that a large part of the play of children seems to be instinctive ; this THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — PLAY. 95 fact throws it into the class of instinctive or inherited forms of action. (2) It is from the standpoint of biology and genetic psychology that play must be considered if we are to understand its true nature as an instinct. From this point of view, we find play to be an expression of the ripening instincts of animals, and instead of being it- self a special kind of instinct, it is an aspect of nearly all the instincts that appear in the animal's develop- ment. It has been called the ontogenetic rehearsal of the phylogenetic series. Whether play looks back- ward or forward is a disputed point. Hall, Johnson and others think the chief characteristic of play ac- tivity is its harking back to the past of the species* history. This activity may have no meaning in the present or future life of the child, but has its only rational interpretation in the fact of recapitulation. As a child passes to maturity, successive neuromus- cular co-ordinations are formed and demand for their growth and development, activity such as was common in the past, the remote past, of the species. Groos, who has studied and written extensively in this field, believes that play looks forward ; that nat- ural selection has led to the survival of those animals that play in their infancy the things that they are to do as adults. Tliis early acti\dty gives exercise and practice to the animal in doing the things that it must as an adult do in order to survive, and as an adult it performs its life activities better because of this early practice. It is very doubtful, if the phenomena of imitation and suggestion be left out of account, that much that we (all play has this interpretation. It is indeed rather ooubtful that a truly instinctive 96 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. action is in need of practice for its perfect perform- ance. The fact seems to be that at least many of the play activities of children have their only rational explanation in the past life of the species, and they have their great significance for the present not in that they are direct preparation for adult activity, but in that they are necessities of individual develop- ment. We reach adulthood only after some twenty years of growth and development. Each step of this growth is conditioned very definitely by preceding steps and stages. The nature of each step has been fixed by our biological past. In other words, devel- oping structures demand, within certain limits, defi- nite activities, which, in turn, condition later devel- opment, and therefore later activities. He who would read aright the long period of infancy must read it in the light of the past. In this way only can we understand the conditions and possibilities of its future. Another theory of play that goes under the names of Schiller and of Spencer is known as the excess energy theory. This theory considers play to be an expression of the excess energy of the individual. It is probably true that this is a prominent factor of much play in children and especially of adults. But the theory does not express the wtole truth for chil- dren when there is no excess energy. And much adult play has its explanation in certain instincts, particularly rivalry and competition. The fact is that there are several forms of activity commonly called play. But while this is true, there is certainly a large class of play activity of children that has its only rational explanation and iiterpretation in some such theory as that held by Hall and Johnson. At THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — PLAY. 97 the same time it may be true that some of these play- activities have their proper explanation in one or the other of the other theories, especially that of Schiller and Spencer. But the play of children considered as the expression of the ripening instincts, and the play of adults considered as the expression of certain strong instincts, such as competition, does justice to most of the facts. That pleasure is always present in play is doubtless due to the fact that play is the free expression of natural functions, and this seems to be true of all instinctive actions. (3) The view* that we have emphasized gives to play a great significance, because it is only by play of the right kind and in the right order that normal individual development can come. Previous consid- erations have shown us that activity is necessary for mental development. Our consideration of play shows that certain forms of activity, within limits, are necessary. Moreover, in infancy, work can not give sufficient activity ; besides it would be difficult to find for a child the right kind of work and nearly im- possible to provide sufficient variety for the best de- *For a view of the nature of play, somewhat similar to the one emphasized in this chapter, see L. E. Appletou, A Comparative Study of the Play Activities of Adnlt Savages and Civilized Chil- dren, 1910. Dr. Appleton thinks that the demands of developing structures for activity is a sufficient explanation of play. "The structure of the body places limitation upon the kind of reaction which it is possible to make. The child, being built upon the same general plan as his ancestors, must of necessity use the same mus- cles and organs and in about the same way, and in so doing both recapitulates the phylogenetic inheritance and anticipates his onto- genetic future in those plays which have been called instinctive, and which are especially typical of infancy and early childhood." This theory, to some extent, takes into account the three principles Involved in the three theories stated above, and doubtless accounts pretty well for all the facts. 98 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. velopment, but play provides for this activity in abundance. The recapitulation theory emphasises the necessity of certain forms of play in different periods of growth — a definite order of plays in order for the individual to reach the highest development. It is needless to say that the actual performances of the child need not be the identical form of activity of our ancestors, but must make demands upon the same aspects of mind and body. But quite apart from all theories of the meaning of play, there can be no question of its great significance for individual development, nor can there be any question that there is a proper sequence of plays best adapted to devel- opment. Indeed, it is the empirical facts that sup- port the recapitulation theory, which is merely an attempt to put meaning into the facts. Development of the play instinct. — In order to understand the development of the play activities we have only to consider the development of the child. For our purposes the life of the child may be divided into three periods: (1) infancy, (2) childhood and (3) youth, and each of these periods may be further divided into an earlier and later period. Infancy is the first five or six years of life, and is the time dur- ing which the child comes into possession of its pow- ers. At birth it is helpless, undeveloped and exer- cises but few of its future functions. Everything must be done for it or it dies. In the first half-dozen years of life it acquires the power of locomotion and of speech; its senses develop and its brain rapidly grows to nearly its full size. By the end of this period it has learned a world and acquired a fairly definite system of responses to this world. This is THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — PLAY. 99 the great period of physical growth and adjustment, and everything looking to the child's welfare should merely provide for healthy growth. Most of the indi- vidualistic instincts come into function, and habits are formed to meet the varied situations of early life. This is pre-eminently an animal period of life. Rea- son is very crude even in the later years of the period — a matter of association merely. The period is most accurately characterised as one of intense activity. The senses are taking in a virgin world, and the muscles are trying this world on every side. Life now is all play. Each awakening impulse must have expression, every organ of sense must function. The world must be tried, the body must be tested. The legs must kick, the hands must pull and poimd and scratch, the mouth must bite. The animal child becomes a human being. This life and this play are simple, and the toys and playthings of the child now should be simple — mere sticks to pound with, bright objects, balls, blocks, sand piles and boxes. The toy is the child's means of interpreting and testing the world. "With it, he learns the properties of matter and forces and provides stimuli for his sense organs. The very first play is largely a matter of experiment- ing with the sense organs and other bodily organs ; the child learns to use himself, learns the extent of his powers. And in the later years of the period the same activity continues and becomes more vigorous and extensive. The activities are extended to the fields and woods and take in a much larger surround- ing ; the child runs, climbs, jumps, and examines and explores every corner of his environment, becomes acquainted in the plant and animal world, and makes 100 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. collections. But all this play is informal, and the child cares little for formal, organised games such as the kindergarten provides. Play is essentially indi- vidualistic, and the child cares only to discover the world and to appropriate it to his own use. In these early years play is the natural teacher through which the child learns the world, on the one hand, and comes into his powers and capacities, on the other. There could be no development without it; it is the child's life and it brings the child to maturity. Infancy and childhood without play are inconceivable. The second period, covering about six years, is one of fair stability, save for its beginning and end, which are transition periods, — transition from in- fancy to childhood and from childhood to youth, — but there are a few years of fair stability, of a fair adjustment to the world. At its beginning the first set of teeth goes and the new set comes in, the brain attains its full growth about eight, then for some four years the child is a fairly complete and perfect individual and meets his environment in a fairly set- tled way, till a new birth and a new life come with the dawn of adolescence. In this period play should provide much and violent exercise, and must satisfy a great variety of interests. The chief games are games of chase that make demands upon the large muscles and limbs. The child now naturally lives the life of a savage, and is a fisherman, hunter, trapper and warrior, and the plays and games of the period are such as call forth these primitive activities. Among the games mentioned by Johnson for this period are : hide and seek, puss in the corner, hawk and chicken, tag, dare base, black man, huntsman. THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS PLAY. 101 baseball, archery, jump rope, blind man's buff, bean bag, guessing games, dancing and nature plays and interests. In the later years of the period, swim- ming, skating, dramatic and imitative plays, throw- ing, shooting, shinney, football and wrestling in addi- tion to most of those just named for the earlier years. Third Stage. Adolescence. — With the coming of adolescence, our boy and girl pass to adulthood. The social instincts now become prominent. Each indi- vidual now tests his powers and finds his place; therefore games of competition are numerous, but at the same time group games that demand co-opera- tion also grow in number and interest. Many of the games and interests of the preceding years are con- tinued in this period, with increasing prominence of the vigorous ones and the out-of-door and nature interests. In this period, as in the preceding, play gives expression to construction, imitation, inquisi- tiveness, curiosity, the gang instinct, and so on. The play spirit appears in nature work, gardening, col- lecting, getting acquainted with wood and stream, i. e., in exploration, adventure, hunting and fishing. All these activities are essentially play and provide for many aspects of human nature, — the migrating, collecting, fighting instincts and perhaps others be- ing allowed to function. Dancing should be a form of play in all the periods, and for this purpose the folk dances and rhythmic group games should be re- vived, and dancing should be one of the free plays of the child rather than a debauched and degenerated social performance of adults. Play and moral character. — Play, especially in the later group games, is a great moral force. Through 102 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. these games the child learns to co-operate, he finds himself by learning where he is weak and where strong. Sympathy develops and all the social fac- tors. The games of youth are therefore a great socialising force. In them the boy learns 'team work' ; he learns to subordinate himself to the group. The games of youth are an excellent preparation for citizenship in a democracy. They should, and under proper conditions do, develop bravery, courage, en- durance, steadiness and faithfulness. The pedagogy of play. — The child will play to the point of exhaustion ; endure hardship and pain with- out murmur. We have said that most play of chil- dren is the expression of awakening instincts, and that the instincts are the only aspects of child life to which the teacher can appeal. It must therefore fol- low that play has most intimate relations to educa- tion. To illustrate : Much of the early work of edu- cating children consists in drill, in fixing certain responses that we think desirable. Now, if these responses can be made part of a game, can become play, a very desirable end is then easily attained, and we shall see later how necessary it is to make a proper appeal to instincts, for unless drill is inter- esting and on a high level of attention it has little value. To become interesting it must appeal strongly to some instinct, — in a word, must become play. In drill work, then, in automatising the formal proc- esses, is a large and important field where play can be of great service to education. In this sphere play is a mould in which the school activities can be fitted ; is an avenue, for the expression of child life, through which development comes. The wise teacher is he THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — PLAY. 103 who can find in the child's nature a motive for its work, and when tliis is found the child will do any- thing; without it, nothing worth while. No activity that is not the expression of some part of child- nature can be a part of education. And those activi- ties that are most potent in education are either play or approach plaj^ in spirit. It is sometimes said that such an educational doctrine as this is dangerous, that it means the making of *' mollycoddles." But this can not be true. It is only a misapplication of the doctrine that does this. Of course, a child must learn that life is serious, that there are duties to be performed, that there is hard work to be done by every one who amounts to anything in this world, and part of a child's training should be a prepara- tion for attacking difficult tasks and sticking to them till they are finished. But a child will get this train- ing best when he is moved by some strong inward motive rather than by outward compulsion. Chil- dren may be driven by fear to do unpleasant things, but if this is against their will it gives little training in doing unpleasant things of their own will. The greatest work is always done by him whose heart is in his work. The greatest achievements will always be those that come from the love of work, and when work itself is loved it is no longer work, but play. The best work will always be done when the pressure is from within, when the organism is nearest to its true, natural functioning, and this is the sort of ac- tivity that we call play. It must not be thought, however, that the school room is to be turned over to the whims of the children. On the contrary, it should always have as its guide and head a person 104 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. of vigor and maturity. This person can, however, bring the children to the highest attainments and development if he make proper demands on native instincts and interests. Play of adults. — The play of adults is not essen- tially different from that of children. It is in the adult, as in the child, the expression of old and funda- mental impulses. The play activity of adults is a sort of mimic world that echoes the life activities of bygone ages ; it is a faint revival of man's older self, and therefore the truest expression of his real self stripped of the latter day accretion. This activity has for him an intrinsic pleasure not dependent upon any other results. Some form of competition, or other old individual instinct, is usually involved. Modern man has gone mad. He thinks he can spend his life in a vain pursuit of illusory wealth and sup- press the functioning of his older, and therefore most real, self. He forgets his wife, he forgets his chil- dren, he forgets to play. He grows old before his time ; he is dead long before he ceases to walk aroimd before his fellows. We must never give up playing. If we continue to play and to associate with children and youth, it will keep us young and keep joy in our hearts. We must revive the social customs of ancient Greece. It is no accident that the Greeks, the great- est of all men, played most of all men. The annual festivals and the Olympiads, bringing all Greece to- gether in mental and physical play, had much to do with her glory. Even our universities are forgetting their function, for they do not teach their students to play. A football * eleven' and a baseball 'nine' about exhaust their capacity, although there are thousands THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — PLAY. 105 of students in attendance. Long walks and excur- sions and games should be part of the daily life of every student. But instead of this, the author finds some of his students so degenerate physically that a few extra tasks send them to the hospital. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOB FITRTHEB STUDY. 1. Make out a complete list of the games and plays that you engaged in as a child and youth. Indicate those that you liked most, and point out the aspect of the game or play that seemed to be the source of pleasure. Do you find a development or succession in the plays? Were there plays that you liked very much at one time, and later did not care for? Interpret what you find. 2. What theory or theories best account for the facts of your own play experience? Do you find some facts supporting each of the theories? 3. Give the experience that you have had as a teacher in. con- trolling play on the school grounds ; if not a teacher, give your experience as a pupil. 4. Give data showing the good effects of the proper kind of adult control of the play of children ; give illustrations showing the bad effects of the wrong sort of control. 5. What is your experience with high-school athletics? What is there good and what bad in them as now conducted? Should high schools have teams of various kinds and play neighboring teams? What are the facts that bear upon this question? 6. Can you cite a case showing that muscle development is not necessary for brain development? Be sure of your facts, and be careful in taking the statements of biographers concerning the early life of eminent men. As a rule, little is known of the early life of great men. 7. How does the farm compare with the city in supplying facili- ties for activity? Compare the conditions and the results of the two types of environment. 8. Can artificial and mechanical indoor activities completely take the place of outdoor play? What seems to be the difference? 9. Carefullv collect statistics of school children for the purpose of determining differences in regard to play activities. For ex- ample make a studv of 50 children that do not care to play and that do not take much exercise, and compare them with 50 other chil- dren that like play and that take abundant exercise. What con- clusions come from your study? 10 Compare the Terr poorest pupils in a schoolroom with the tery best in regard to their play and work activities. il Is play activity necessary for development, or will work 106 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. activity do just as well? Discuss every aspect of the question. Take especial account of the feeling aspect of work and play. 12. Is it natural for older people to care less for play than do children? Do you think it advisable for adults in America to play more than they now do? Why? 13. What do you think of football and baseball as forms of activity for high-school boys? 14. Do you think it advisable for boys and girls to play together throughout childhood and youth? What are the facts to be con- sidered here? 15. Compare girls that like outdoor play and vigorous exei'cise, including play with boys, with girls that do not play with boys ana do not care much for vigorous play — the girls that do their hair up on the top of their heads and consider themselves women. 16. Rank the pupils of a school room from the best to the poor- est in school studies. What do you find in regard to the play of the two halves of the group? 17. Spend a day watching children play, comparing the play of children of different ages. What differences do you find as to what they play and the manner of playing? 18. Is there any danger that children that play a great deal will come to like play only and dislike work? 19. Is a teacher to try to make play out of everything? Should a teacher make a sharp distinction between play and work? Why? 20. If a child is deprived of the proper amount and variety of play as a child, is it possible to make up for this later in life? 21. Show that what is play for one may be work for another, considering singing, playing musical instruments, mathematics, etc. 22. In what phase of school work is play most applicable? Show how it may be used in various studies. 23. Should teachers act as police on the playground, or should they take part in the plays and enter into the spirit of the pupils? Why? 24. How sliould a teacher deal with a child that does not care for play, but wishes to sit around and read all the time? 25. Sometimes young children enjoy work better than older children. Why is this? 26. Which has played the greater part in the achievements cf man, the play spirit and mere curiosity, or necessity? Collect facts for the answer of this question. REFEBENCES. Kirkpatrick, Fundamentals of Child Study, p. 147; G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence, Ch. iii; Youth, Ch. vi ; H. H. Donaldson, The Groicth of the Brain, Ch. xviii ; J. 'SI. Taylor, Motor Education for the Child, in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. Ixxviii, p. 268; A. F. Chamberlain, The Child, 1901, Ch. ii, an excellent chapter ; L. H. Gulick, The Psychological, Pedagogical and Religious Aspects of Chroup Games, In Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. vi, p. 135 ; Some Psy- THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — PLAY. 107 cJiical Aspects of Muscular Exercise, in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. liii, p. 793 ; The Healthful Art of Dancing, 1910 ; The Efficient Life, 1907; G. E. Johnson, Education by Plays and Games, 1907; K. Groos, The Play of Animals, 1898 ; The Play of Man, 1901 ; W. P. Bowen, The Mechanics of Bodily Exercise, 1909; N. B. Lamkin, Play: Its Value and Fifty Games, 1907 ; E. B. Mero, American Play- grounds, 1908; A, Leland, Playground Technique and Playcraft, 1909; L. E. Appleton, A Comparative Study of the Play Activities of Adult Savages and Civilised Children, 1910; J. W. Dinsmore, Teaching a District School, tcith a Supplement on Playtime, 1910; M. B. Newton, Graded Games and Rhythmic Exercises, 1909; G. Sisson, Children's Play, in Barnes' Studies in Education, Vol, i, p. 171 ; H. D. Sheldon, Institutional Activities of American Children, in American Journal of Psych., Vol. ix, p. 425 ; J. H. Chase, Street Games of New York City, in Pedagogical Seminary, Vol. xii, p. 503 ; G. Dudley and F. A. Kellor, Athletic Games for Women, 1909; L. Beard and A. B. Beard, Recreations for Girls, 1908; C. W. Cramp- ton, The Folk Dance Book, 1909; C. Crawford, Folic Dances and Games, 1908 ; B. R. Parsons, Plays and Games, 1909. Chaptee IX. THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS— IMITATION. Description and definition. — The phenomenon of imitation is but a special manifestation of a funda- mental principle of organic matter, i. e., the prin- ciple of stimulus going over into response; in the higher animals, perception going over into action. Stimulus has no meaning apart from response ; sen- sation has no meaning apart from action. The only reason that one should have sensation is that one may be able to respond to the environment. In the case of imitative movements, the response is more or less like the stimulus, more or less like the source of sensation calling it forth. Natural selection has de- veloped this form of action, just as it has developed all other inherited forms. There is no reason in nature why any sort of resi)onse should not be coupled with any sort of stimulus. That a large number of the responses of children reproduce the stimuli of the environment, i. e., are imitative, is a matter of heredity, and therefore this particular form of activity is considered to be instinctive. Ow- ing to the peculiar circular nature of imitative action, Baldwin defines it as that reaction that tends to main- tain or reyeat its own stimulating process. This is especially evident in the imitation of sounds. The young child will repeat the same sound over and over again for many minutes at a time, each sound being [108] THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — IMITATION. 109 the stimulus for the production of the next one. But it makes no difference what the sensory source of the perception may be — although it is usually sight or sound — the perception of the movement calls forth the same sort of movement ; there is a resemblance between stimulus and response, and therefore in many cases the response may serve as a new stimulus to call forth a similar response. The continuation of the circular process is not, however, necessary to this form of action, nor does it always take place. The essential characteristic that differentiates this form of inherited response is just this resemblance be- tween the animal's response and the objective means of calling it forth. A chicken hears a hawk and darts under cover. This is a matter of heredity, of the individualistic instinct of fear. A child sees an older person put on a hat ; it then takes a hat and puts it on its own head. This is also a matter of heredity; we say it is due to the instinct of imitation. Psychological explanation. — The phenomenon of imitation is easily understood when we recall the fact that the idea of a movement tends to call forth the movement, and will usually do so unless there is some inhibiting idea or sensory stimulus. In the early years of life the connection between idea and re- sponse is unusually close and direct; the lesson of inactivity is not yet learned. The perception of movement functions immediately to call forth a simi- lar movement, or a movement that serves to produce the same effect for sensation. Imitation in lower animals. — Among the lower ani- mals, particularly below the primates, there is little imitation. Their acts are the inherited responses 110 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. that fit all the particular phases of the environment, or the result of the modification of these responses by experience. Their responses are definite and im- mediate. It has not been necessary for these animals to imitate in order to get on in the world. The vc ry character of their mentality is to some extent a Lar to the calling forth of similar responses by the per- ception of a movement. They do not seem to have free ideas which are essential to many forms of imi- tation. The perception of a movement made by an- other being has not, in many cases, developed into the character of a stimulus for the same kind of movement or movement ])roducing the same sensory effect. Moreover, even if psychologically possible, imitation is not physically so, for not many animals live with their parents long enough to learn much from them by imitation, and therefore their re- sjjonses must be ready made and definite. Finally, experiments prove that the animals below man do not learn much by imitation ; possibly only the very highest can learn at all in this way. As Spalding points out, chickens may live continually with tur- keys, but do not learn the more efficient turkey method of catching flies. In certain animals of a social nature natural selection has developed a sort of reflex imitation. The fact is that imitation is pre- eminently a phenomenon of infancy and infancy is essentially a human characteristic. Only the young of the human race have a long period of helplessness, during which the primitive instincts are moulded and modified into permanent life-adjustments. Only a long period of plastic infancy could make it possible for imitation to play an important role in develop- THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS IMITATION. Ill ment. Therefore, infancy and imitation are related facts, and with the prolonging of human infancy, together with the fact that this infancy is spent with the parents in a family group, imitation has come to be, perhaps, the most important factor in acquire- ment of permanent adjustments. Function and importance of imitation. — (1) As a means of adaptation. Normally the child lives with its parents for at least one-fourth of its life, and sees done practically all the things that it will ever have to do. Nature has so developed it that the sight of an act performed by the parents or elders serves as a stimulus for doing the same thing, and this is the basis of most that the child learns to do. Therefore imitation becomes of enormous importance not only during the period of development, but all through life ; it is one of the means by which every new indi- vidual becomes adapted or adjusted. (2) As a means of interpretation. Royce has pointed out that imita- tion is a means of interpretation, serving to interpret the acts of another. It is only by repeating, ourselves, the acts of another that we can Imow how the other person feels or what his purpose is. Observation shows that there is usually a tendency to do what ore sees another do, and particularly is this true in the case of the young. This fact is the secret of learning elocution, music, and all the arts of expression. We must do another person's act and say his words; then we have his point of view. To some extent wo become the other person. Therefore, imitation serves the double purpose of adaptation and inter- pretation. Development of imitation. — Imitation begins in 112 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. the latter part of the child's first year as mere sen- sory responses, made for the pleasure only, with no conscious end in view. But its development is rapid, and it performs a larger and larger function, till in the second year it becomes purposive; that is, the child tries to accomplish what the elder person does, by using the same means. At first, then, imitation is largely blind and reflex; the cliild immediately and directly does what he sees done. Then there comes a gradual growth in complexity, due in part to the general mental development, from perceptual to ideational, from crude reproductions of the activity and life about, to elaborate and exact reproductions of tliis life and activity. In early imitation the child is satisfied with imperfect representations of the life and activity about, but later he tries to reproduce the imitated activities with much exactness as to set- ting and all the details. Moreover, the social element enters and serves to extend the field of imitation. Even a brief study of children will afford abundant illustration of the evolution of imitation in the indi- vidual. For example: a straight stick will at first suffice for a horse, and performs the functions of a horse in the child's play, but as the child grows older he tries to make his play horse approach nearer and nearer to the likeness of a real horse. Also, in the imitation of adult social activities, the development is plain : at first in a play tea party the crudest rep- resentations will suffice, but when the child grows older the dishes and food and all the attendant cir- cumstances must approximate those which are proper in a tea party of adults. Education and imitation. — {1) Basis of education. THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — IMITATION. 113 Imitation, with imitative play, performs an important function in education, and with the possible exception of play is by far the most important single factor. Let us, for example, consider the boy on the farm. He learns how to harness horses, hitch them up, feed them, how to plow and do all the other things that are done on the farm, including the manipulation of farm tools and machinery, chiefly by imitation. In like manner, the girl in the home learns how to cook and sew and perform the various duties about the house chiefly by imitation. We learn to speak our native tongue almost entirely by imitation, and there is con- sequently a close resemblance between the speech of parent and child. Mechanics and even professional men learn their trades and professions largely by imitation. In the school room, too, imitation rightly plays an important role: in learning methods of solving problems, in grammar and language, in writ- ing, drawing, singing and in reading, — in everything that has an expression or doing side, — it is an impor- tant factor. Especially is it important in making a beginning, in acquiring the rudiments of a subject. At first, we can only imitate; later we can have a little originality. In our study of habits we shall see how important imitation is. Whenever a child has to learn and perfect a new skilful act, it is economical for the teacher to demonstrate the precise nature of the act, showing the child the exact steps of the process. Teachers do not sufficiently realise how completely imitative are the acts of the child and how little of reason and of thought there is in them. The child has this capacity for learning and adjustment long before reason can function to any great extent, 114 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. and instead of wasting time trying to appeal to rea- son when there is no reason, the teacher should avail himself of this capacity for learning that functions from the early months of childhood. Moreover, there is no need for reason in the great portion of early adjustments, for they are in most part merely a mechanical adjustment to our physical and social surroundings, those that natural selection has sifted out as necessary for our social life, and all that is required is that the child should come as soon as pos- sible into this social heritage. "Why should the child reason in these matters'? Even if our adjustments are not the best possible, the child is certainly not able to sit as a critic in the matter and choose his course of action. He must more or less blindly take on such forms of adjustment as are already in exist- ence. In fact, for the young, the only other mode of learning that can function much is the trial and suc- cess method, and the latter is not usually so econom- ical as the former, though, of course, economy is not always the most important thing to consider. Both of these methods are functioning from the very be- ginning. The trial and success method serves to cor- rect what might be the extreme results of learning by imitation. Certainly in the acquirement of any skill imitation is often the most important factor. Correct speech is a matter of example and imitation much more than of rules and precepts; so also are manners and morals. Our children pay much more attention to what we do than to what we say. Imita- tion has much to do with order and discipline in the school room. The cross and ugly-tempered teacher is likely to have a cross and ugly school. In learning THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — IMITATION. 115 to read, perhaps as much as anywhere else, the value of imitation is apparent. A child should hear much good reading both at home and at school, and fortu- nate is the child whose mother and teacher are good readers. A mother should read to her children from the time when they are able to sit on her knee and listen, and when the children are older and go to school the teacher should read much, very much, to them. If the teacher is not a good reader and a good story-teller, then he should not be a teacher. (2) Ow social inheritance. Imitation is the means by which we come into our social heritage. Our be- liefs, customs, morals, religion, traditions, language, social relations, as we have already seen, come in large measure through imitation. Since without this social heritage we should not rise above primitive, uncivilised, savage life, the significance of imitation is immediately apparent, and it is seen that as a means of transmitting the acquirements of civilisa- tion it becomes one of the most important factors of early education. The forms and moulds of civilised life, the more or less mechanical and automatic re- sponses that we have as members of society, we take on unconsciously by imitating those about us, as we also take on an habitual attitude toward social insti- tutions. Imitation is the mechanism of social hered- ity, and it is social heredity that constitutes our civi- lisation. (3) As a means of interpretation, imitation has almost as important educational significance. To illustrate: in the study of literature, history and the manners and customs of different peoples, dramatic imitation becomes a key to unlock what would other- 116 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. wise remain hidden, and from the first grade to the twelfth the teacher should make use of this means of interpreting the life of other people and of other times. By acting out and reproducing a piece of literature or historical event the pupil makes it real, makes it live again, while otherwise it usually re- mains a dead, unreal fact. Through dramatisation the fact really comes within the pupil's experience. This point of view emphasises the doing aspect of education. What the child does is no longer some- thing foreign, but becomes a part of the child. The pupil that has acted Miles Standish, or Ilamlet, or Caesar, or Jupiter, has a new relation to these char- acters, for in a sense he has been Hamlet, Standish, Caesar or Jupiter. The theater may some day be an important part of the school, a place for dance and song and play, a place where life is presented to the children, and where they give expression to their own ideas and conceptions of life, a place where the past and present meet, where the past becomes the pres- ent through the actions of the children. School management and imitation. — The phe- nomena of imitation have an important bearing on school management. (1) The teacher. The character and temperament of the teacher are important, even his looks and health and manners. The teacher's attitude and enthusiasm toward the different studies are contagious and readily affect the children, while if the teacher dislike a subject and shows an aver- sion to it, the pupils reflect this attitude. The teacher's scholarship and intellectual integrity should be high and unimpeachable; his earnestness and accuracy in his work, his regard for truth, can THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — IMITATION. 117 not be too great. And if he is to do his work well and stand the great strain of his profession, he must be a man of good health and strong body ; his sense organs and all other important organs of his body should have the very highest functional capacity. He should have no defects or deformities. The men that society selects for the teachers of the young should be the highest types physically and mentally that the race affords. Not only must they be free from physical defects, but must have no oddities or peculiarities of manner or of speech. In these mat- ters they should be tj^pical of their time and the people among whom they work. It is a common- place, but none the less true, that the school reflects the teacher. (2) The children. The small minority of children that are deformed, defective and deficient, with nervous disorders, defects of speech, incor- rigibles, should be removed from the normal ma- jority for the good of all, not only of the normal chil- dren, but for their own best good. There is just as much reason for removing them as there is for re- moving from the school those children that have con- tagious diseases ; for, on account of imitation, these characteristics are contagious and affect the whole school. Through imitation — largely reflex — these affections spread and demoralise the whole school. One bad, disorderly boy can ruin a whole day's work at school, sometimes a whole term's work. Stam- mering, stuttering and other nervous disorders are taken up by many of the children in a room. Even poor work and bad scholarship are contagious. There- fore there is abundant reason for segregating those children that deviate considerably from the normal. 118 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. Not only is this to be recommended for the good of those normal children that would be badly affected by their influence, but it should be done in order to supply the proper sort of training for those that deviate. In the graded schools this is practicable and is already successfully done, but in the rural schools it does not seem to be practicable without sending the defective child away from his home, and this does not seem advisable unless the defect is extreme, such as deafness, blindness or other de- fect that renders him unfit to receive training from the ordinary teacher. Contrary suggestion. — An interesting phenomenon of imitation is that of contrary suggestion. This phenomenon is in perfect harmony with the other facts of imitation, and is merely a matter of the idea of an act calling forth the act. However, there may sometimes be another element involved which is probably a manifestation of the fighting instinct, possibly of the instinct of curiosity. In certain chil- dren, and perhaps sometimes in the early life of all children, the suggestion of some line of action serves to call forth a contrary action. If the child is told to eat a certain kind of food, then he will not eat it, but if he be told not to eat it, he will eat it. It is therefore a dangerous procedure to show bad ex- amples and call the attention of children to what they should not do or should not be. The danger lies in the fact that the example serves as a stimulus, in accordance with the general law of imitation, to call forth the action in question, and this stimulus is stronger than the inhibiting force of the teacher's or parent's warning not to do the thing in question. THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — IMITATION. 119 No general rule, however, can be laid down to cover this matter; much depends on the manner in which the example is shown and on the temperament of the children in question. Parents ought soon to know how to deal with their own children in this regard, but a teacher can not know the children so well, and, besides, they are widely different. Teachers often bring much trouble upon themselves by forbidding children to do things that they might never think of doing if they were not suggested to them. A case that once was brought to the author's attention will illus- trate the point : A new teacher came into a country district and on the first day told the boys that they must not climb on top of a shed that stood in the school yard. They had never in all the years that the shed had been there thought of getting on top of it, but now, before the end of the day, they all got up there and tore the shed down. It seems that the for- bidding of a certain act sometimes not only calls especial attention to the act, but arouses the fighting spirit of the child and serves as a tantalizing stimu- lus which can hardly be resisted. Children's ideals. — Our consideration of imitation leads us to the general question of children's ideals. There are in general three sources for these ideals : (1) the characters of literature, (2) the characters of history, and (3) living characters which the child may know personally or through his reading. The influence of the characters of the different groups is different for dif/erent children and in different periods of the life of the same child. Many experi- mental and statistical studies have been made to Jearn the facts concerning the ideals of children and 120 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. their development. Some important results have come out of the studies. Perhaps the most important is this : The sort of character of either literature or history that appeals to a child as a model for imita- tion depends on the stage of development of the child. Throughout childhood and youth, however, the character that appeals to boys especially is the character of action, — the warrior, the hunter, the Indian fighter, the fisherman, the man of the woods. The boy cares little for the man of mere static or negative goodness. Therefore the literature that should be brought to the attention of boys is that which presents to them a sturdy life of vigor and endurance. The he- roes of history should be familiar to every boy almost before he can read. On his mother's knee the American boy should hear of Washington, Franklin, Lincoln, and all the great generals and sailors that have made our country's history. Deeds of valor and heroism, especially deeds of patriotism, should be made familiar to every child. The story of the early pioneers and all the stirring events of our country's early history should be told to the young children. In their early years these characters have an influence on them that they will not have later. In the child's own surroundings it is the active and vigorous that appeals to him. He likes to watch the carpenter, the bricklayer, the ditch-digger, the black- smith, — any one who is achieving something. It is well that this is so, and we should provide the means for the child to imitate these workmen, — means in the form of carpenters' tools and work bench and gardens. As children grow older the field from which THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — IMITATION. 121 they choose their ideals is extended to all time and all countries. Parents and teachers in guiding the reading for children should always have the matter of ideals in mind, and should often discuss with the children the nature of the characters of their reading and draw from them their ideas and conclusions, without too much preaching. It should be one of the main functions of the high school to unlock the great treasures of literature for the pupils, and it has not done its duty if it allows a child to leave school with- out being familiar with Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and all the greatest creations of literary art. The facts of imitation make it clear that teachers, particularly the teachers of boys, should be strong, vigorous men ; vigorous and manly in mind as well as in body; not weakly, lazy, effeminate, insipid young men, but men of maturity, intensely patriotic and full of our country's history and literature. Girls might very well have such teachers, too, but not altogether. Investigation reveals the curious fact that girls usually choose male ideals, and this is not fortunate nor auspicious for our future. It may be all right for the girl in her early years to have about the same ideals as the boys, but certainly later her models should be the world's great women, and this includes her own faithful mother and grandmother, with their lives of honest toil and good old-fashioned ways and notions of work and morals and true integrity. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR FtTRTHER STUDY. 1. (iive several Illustrations to show that imitation functioni to interpret the environment and to adapt the individual to th* environment. 2. Carefully obs«»rv€ children of different ages, noting and com- 122 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. paring their imitative acts. How early in the child's life does the first imitative act appear? 3. Have you ever observed imitation in domestic animals? If so, make an accurate report of it. 4. Make out a list of acts that you have learned by imitation. How does it compare with the things that you have learned to do in other ways? 5. Point out the part played by imitation in learning arithmetic, reading, writing, spelling, language, style in composition, history, geography, manners and morals, and in one's religion and politics. State whether your religion is the same as that of your parents. 6. Compare the imitative activities of children of various ages to determine what aspect of the life about them they imitate. Try to trace out the development of imitation from childhood to late adolescence from your own observation. 7. Make out a list of all the teachers you had in the public school, and indicate to what extent you imitated each, and what aspect of their lives you imitated. Were there any that you en- deavored especially not to imitate? 8. Can you cite cases in which a bad parent or teacher was the cause of children leading an upright life ; that is, a case in which a bad example was the cause of good action? If there are such cases, how can they be explained? 9. If you have been a teacher, to what extent did you imitate in the early part of your teaching? 10. Has some older person — parent, teacher or friend — had a profound influence on your life? If so, write an account of it, giving details as to the nature of the person and the amount and kind of influence. 11. Discuss coeducation from the point of view of imitation. Treat of elementary, high school and college education. 12. Have you ever had an ideal in history or literature that has influenced your life ? Who was the person or character, and what the influence? 13. Compare the imitative activities of country children with those of city children. Does this give any indication of the im- portance of imitation as a means of adaptation? Does it throw any light on the importance of environment in the life of a child? 14. Show that imitation is a great factor in moral training. 15. Make a careful comparison of imitation, as a factor in learning and development, with all other factors. 16. When you have the opportunity as a teacher, make a study of the ideals of children along the lines suggested by the studies of Barnes, as indicated in the second volume of the Studies in Education. (See references.) 17. Give data from your own experience or observation to show the great Importance of ideals in adolescence. 18. Cite cases showing the effects of the attitude of a teacher toward studies; his attitude toward important principles of life and action. THE ADAPTIVE INSTINCTS — IMITATION. 123 19. How can the very highest type of man be secxired for the teaching profession? Read Cattell's article on The School and the Family, in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. Ixxiv, p. 84. Do you think it possible for such teachers as he indicates to be secured for all our schools? Should we werk toward some such ideal? What should be the first steps toward it? 20. A student in one of the author's classes once reported that In a teachers' examination which he had just attended nearly all the applicants for certificates cheated. Why did they do it? Should they be allowed to teach children? If a teacher is dishonest in getting his license to teach, is he likely to be an honest and truthful teacher? 21. Should officials who examine teachers be as careful about the character of the applicant as about his scholarship? 22. Show fully the use that can be made of dramatisation in the different grades and the different subjects. Point out espe- cially how it can be a means of interpreting the life of other countries and other times. befehences. Kirkpatrlck, Fundamentals of Child Study, Ch. viii ; Oenetio Psychology, 1909, p. 124; M. V. O'Shea. Social Development and Education, 1909, Ch. xvii ; J. Royce, Psychological Review, Vol. il, p. 217; Century, Vol. xlviii. p. 137; R. Steel. Imitation, 1910; A. E. Tanner, The Child, 1904, Ch. xv ; J. M. Baldwin, Mental Develop- ment, Methods and Processes, 1900, Chs. vi, ix, x, xl and xii ; C. Frear, Ped. Sem., Vol. iv. p. 382 ; E. M. Haskell. Ped. Sem., Vol. iii, p. 30; E. L. Thorndike, Animal Intelligence, 1898, pp. 47-64; A. J. Kinnaman. American Journal of Psychology, Vol. xiii, p. 196; L. W. Cole, Concerning the Intelligence of Raccoons, in Journal of Comparative Neurology, Vol. xvii. No. 3 ; H. Miinsterberg. Psy- chology and the Teacher. 1909, Ch. xix. On children's ideals, E. M. Darrah, A Study of Children's Ideals, in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. liii. p. 88; W. G. Chambers. The Evolution of Ideals, in Ped. Sem., Vol. X, p. 101 ; E. Barnes, Children's Ideals, in Ped. Sem., Vol. vii. p. 3 ; Type Study of Ideals, in Studies in Education, Vol. II, pp. 37, 78, 115, 157, 198, 237, 319, 359, 392. Chapteb X. HABIT. Nature of habit. — Habit may be defined as a defi- nite, acquired response to a definite stimulus. It differs from instinct, as was pointed out in chapter IV, in being a type of response whose definiteness has been acquired and fixed in the lifetime of the indi- vidual. There is no essential psychological or phys- iological difference between these two forms of ac- tion; they differ only in the matter of their origin. The instinctive response is one whose co-ordination, with its stimulus, is provided for in inherited struc- tures and does not have to be learned and perfected by practice. But an habitual response is one that is learned, perfected and fixed by practice, by repeti- tion. The nervous system is but a means of connect- ing and co-ordinating the muscular response of an indi^ddual with the impressions of the external world. Now, those responses that are most essential and fundamental to the life of the animal become insured by the fixing, through heredity, of the ner- vous connection between sense organ and muscle, binding together stimulus and response, so that when the stimulus is first presented to the individual the response comes with considerable definiteness and precision. Such a response is instinctive and is the result of natural selection acting upon the animals of a species. When a movement becomes so neces- [124] HABIT. 125 sary in the life of an individual that it is repeated over and over again, its connection with its stimulus or the situation that calls it forth becomes more and more definite, and the probability that the given stim- ulus or situation will evoke the same response be- comes greater and greater. The nature of the ner- vous chain which functions to join stimulus and re- sponse is doubtless the same in the two cases. James,* who has written the best chapter on habit, says: **The moment one tries to define habit, one is led to the fundamental properties of matter. The laws of nature are but the immutable habits which the different elementary sorts of matter follow in their actions and reactions upon each other. In the organic world, however, the habits are more variable than this. * * * The philosophy of habit is thus, in the first instance, a chapter in physics rather than in physiology or psychology. That it is at bottom a physical principle is admitted by all good recent writers on the subject." James then proceeds to give examples in the physical world of the analogues of habit in the organic world. The river sticks to its channel after it has cut it deep in the earth, a lock works better after it has been used, a coat 'sets' to the back of its owner. If a flat piece of glass has a drop of water put upon it, and is then tilted slightly, the drop wanders rather slowly and uncertainly across the surface of the glass. But if another drop is put in the same place and the experiment repeated, it moves off readily in the path of the first. These analogies may not throw much light on the nature of habit, but they may very well serve to call our atten- •Prlnciples of Psychology, Vol. 1, ch. Iv. 126 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. tion to the fact that the ultimate explanation of habit is doubtless physical or chemical. The bare fact seems to be, as far as we know it, that the passage of a nervous discharge along a certain path facili- tates future discharges along the same path. And in general the more often the same impression is fol- lowed by the same neuro-muscular change, the more certain and definite the physiological connection seems to become. Not only does every repetition serve to fix the habit, but the fixing of the habit goes on to some extent between repetitions. It has been said that the nervous system ''grows to the modes in which it has been exercised," that we "learn to swim in winter and to skate in summer. ' ' This means that our habits are being formed not only while we are actually repeating the act, but also between times. To some extent the nervous system is built up around the paths once marked out. The actual nature of the change that has taken place in the nerves is not known, but it must be some sort of chemical or phys- ical rearrangement of particles that makes easy a nervous discharge along the accustomed path. With- out speculating concerning the ultimate basis of habit, the psychologist is warranted in assuming a physiological basis. The neuro-muscular system de- velops and 'sets' along the line of its exercise. Function of habit. — The results that are accom- plished for an individual by habits are both biolog- ical and psychological. (1) The biological results. (a) Habit perfects a response by making it more ac- curate and therefore better serve its purpose. Some illustrations will make the point clear. Suppose one wishes to throw a ball and hit a mark. The first HABIT 127 throws go wide of the mark, but with practice they go nearer and nearer to the mark. With much prac- tice, extending over many months and years, a per- son can throw with great accuracy. The learning of any performance demanding skill shows the same thing: typewriting, piano playing, driving nails, sewing, knitting, and even expressing one's thoughts in spoken or written words. In each there is a prog- ress from poor performance to accurate perform- ance. Habit, then, first of all, secures the accurate performance of a response, (b) Not only is the habitual act ordinarily performed more accurately than before habituation, but it is performed more quickly. The person learning typewriting not only improves in accuracy, but also in speed. The begin- ner at typewriting makes more mistakes and at the same time goes more slowly than does the experi- enced performer. The mathematician increases his speed as well as his accuracy. In any field of activity where one moves accurately, one moves also quickly. The experienced surgeon performs the most delicate operation with great dispatch. The carpenter, the blacksmith, — the experienced workman in every field, — has both accuracy and speed. It is the inex- perienced workman that is slow, inaccurate, awk- ward, (c) It follows that the habitual act is per- formed with less waste of energy. Unnecessary movements are eliminated; the stimulus goes over directly to the appropriate response without being side-tracked to unnecessary movements. It is indeed because of this close, definite, mechanical connection of stimulus and response that the act is performed with more accuracy and speed. The inexperienced 128 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY tennis player is soon exhausted because of the tre- mendous energy unnecessarily expended in receiving and serving the balls. Nearly every muscle in the body is brought into service. Not so with the accom- plished player ; for him the unnecessary movements are eliminated; long practice has co-ordinated and mechanised for him all the various movements. A ball approaching in a certain fashion is met by a defi- nite sort of stroke. The best player is the one that has best perfected the various movements. If one watches a child or even an adult trying to perform a new and difficult act, one can see the indications of waste of energy in grimaces, writhing, twisting of the body in awkward, unnecessary movements. These superfluous movements disappear with practice, and, as a rule, the most efficient performer of any act does it with the greatest ease, with the least effort, (d) The habitual act is performed with less fatigue, doubtless, in part at least, because of the elimination of unnecessary movements and the close mechanical connection of stimulus and response. There may be less fatigue partly because the body is actually bet- ter able to perform the act because of practice. The muscles involved actually have more strength, and there may be more nervous energy available. Use adapts the organism for the response. Because of this adaptation the organism has more capacity for endurance. It is the novice that gives out first in any performance. The inexperienced walker gives out in an hour or two ; the habitual walker can go all day with ease. The boy learning carpentry soon tires of driving nails; the experienced carpenter can work all day long and day after day. Capacity to endure, HABIT 129 whatever may be the causes, is one of the important results of habituation, (e) Not only does habituation accomplish the above improvements for the organ- ism, but it makes the appropriate response more cer- tain upon the appearance of the required situation; more certain, because more mechanical and direct. The nervous path involved, because of having been so frequently used, with ever more and more fatality, carries the stimulus into immediate and certain ac- tion. Therefore, the biological function of habit • might be said to be to perfect a response and pre- serve it in its purity, securing the greatest possible efficiency with the greatest possible economy of effort. (2) The psychological results, (a) The process of habituation tends to take an action outside the realm of active attention. The action that at first has a high clearness value, is rich in conscious content, by repetition drops to a lower conscious level. In the repeated performance of any act the progress is toward automatisation and mechanisation of move- ment and away from richness in conscious content. In other words, the habitual movement has little con- scious accompaniment, and indeed it is possible to carry it to the point of complete automatisation till it has the characteristic, almost, of a simple reflex. In such cases the movement is turned over to the lower nervous centers and may be completely outside the realm of consciousness. This end, the mechanisation of movement, is the goal toward which all repeated movements tend, (b) While the conscious aspect of an habitual movement is poor in sensory and idea- tional content, its affective change is not quite so 130 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY simple, for there clearly is not simply a loss of affect- ive value, but rather a change to pleasantness. Habitual movements seem to become a necessity of the organism in much the same way that instinctive movements do, and therefore pleasurable. More- over, the fact that they are performed with ease and without much fatigue would indicate their pleasur- ableness, for, as a rule, what we do with ease we do with pleasure. At any rate, whether the acquiring of a pleasant affective accompaniment is universal or not, it must be true that the loss of any unpleasant accompaniment is general. Of course, there may be conditions accompanying the performance of an habitual act that bring unpleasantness, but it is not due to the act itself. One may tire of doing the habitual act just as one may tire of doing the instinct- ive thing. There seems to be at least a vague content and satisfaction with having done the habitual thing, and this fact becomes quite evident when a person or animal is prevented from doing the long habituated thing. The long performance of an act seems to make that performance necessary for the health and well-being, sometimes even the life, of the animal. When a habit is broken off there may sometimes be pleasure at first from the change, but there usually comes a yearning for the old performance, a desire for the old activity, that sometimes can not be re- sisted. Doing the accustomed thing, then, gives at least a vague content and satisfaction that becomes apparent when the habitual act is interrupted. It must be noted here that muscular movement, from whatever point of view it is considered, has tre- mendous significance for animal life. The organised HABIT 131 movements of an individual, instinctive and acquired, largely determine the individual's needs and pleas- ures, (c) Fatigue is both physiological and psycho- logical, i. e., there is exhaustion of energy and there is a feeling of exhaustion. It follows that the de- crease of fatigue from habituation is one of the psy- chological results, (d) Another psychological result is a feeling of confidence that one has toward an act that one can perform with skill. After long perform- ance of an act one acquires such skill that the per- formance can be approached with confidence, without fear of failure, because long experience has taught the person just what can be done. The performer knows just what the possibilities are. The very fact that the task is approached with a feeling of confi- dence and surety makes success more likely. The psychological function of habit is, therefore, to re- move the necessity of active attention. With the habituated action in the background of attention, it is then possible for other processes to occupy the focus of attention at the same time that the habitual action is going on. It is interesting to contemplate what life would be without habit. If all our actions were always performed as if for the first time, life would be difiicult, to say the least. Dressing, and eat- ing three meals a day would use up our energy and take the most of our time ; but, thanks to the effects of habit, nearly all these routine actions of every day occurrence go on of themselves without the aid of consciousness, which is accordingly relieved for other and higher functioning. Importance of habit in education. — We have learned that education is a process of adjustment, an 132 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY apprenticeship in learning the world and acquiring a set of responses that will enable the individual to live. He must learn the nature of the various things in the environment, — how they act and how he must act in their presence. As the years of an individual's development go by a system of responses is built up and perfected. By the end of the first third of life this system is fairly well complete. "Whether the child goes to school or not, in this sense, he is edu- cated ; some sort of system of action is perfected and fixed. And within the limits set by the instincts any sort of system is possible. Lying, murder, stealing, robbery, deceit are possible, as well as truthfulness, honesty, acts of sympathy and helpfulness, and all other forms of virtuous action that lead to mutual happiness. The schools are an institution of society that undertakes to guide and control the formation of habits that will be for the highest social good. The twofold function of education is quite plain: (1) On the one hand, it can guide and assist the child in acquiring knowledge, and (2) on the other hand, it can perform the same function in the matter of habit- formation. In the past the Imowledge side of educa- tion has been emphasized and the habit side largely neglected. Indeed, it has often been forgotten that the acquiring of knowledge is but a part of education, that knowledge is only a means, that it should always point to action. Education should be as much con- cerned with guiding, perfecting and fixing an individ- ual's responses as with the organisation of his ideas to guide these responses. There is no question that every individual soon becomes largely a creature of habit. It is the business of education to guide and HABIT 133 aid in securing the formation of such a system of habits as will serve the highest interests of the indi- vidual and society. As soon as a child is born habit- formation sets in, — at first in such matters as time and manner of taking food, time, place and manner of going to sleep, methods of getting what it wants, etc. The process goes on, soon including manner of speech, of eating, of walking, of writing, of reading, relation to others, continuing for twenty-five or thirty years till a system is perfected that meets the individual's needs. It may be that it meets them more inadequately than would some other system, but it meets them. The rule is that this system of responses thus acquired and perfected suffices for the rest of life with little modification. The individual :s henceforth very much a machine, reacting largely mechanically, with rather definite ways of meeting the various situations of life. There is no way of avoiding this outcome of individual development. And, on the whole, it is well that as many of life's reactions as possible be mechanised and handed over to the lower nerve-centers. The utmost that educa- tion can hope to do is to keep the individual plastic until the highest possible forms of responses for the various situations of life can be acquired and fixed. But it is nonsense to talk about keeping the individ- ual permanently plastic; set he will and must. And fortunate we may consider the individual if we can prolong his infancy till he acquires what may be con- sidered a fairly adequate form of response. The view of education as the conscious attempt of society to assist the child in organising his knowl- edge of the world and in perfecting and habituating 134 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY. his responses can not be too clearly kept in view. And the possibilities and limitations must never be forgotten. On the knowledge side we can assist the child in acquiring knowledge and to some extent de- termine what knowledge it will acquire. On the habit side there are great possibilities. Sufficient wisdom, patience and care on the part of elders enable the normal child to reach maturity with the great majority of his necessary reactions reduced to a fair degree of automatisation. Speaking, writing, reading, social responses, the various routine actions of every-day life, and even moral and professional actions, can, for the most part, be reduced far toward the plane of unconscious mechanism. It shall be our concern in the pages that immediatelly follow to work out the laws that control the process of habit- formation so that we may know how to proceed intel- ligently to guide and assist in their formation. It is evident that the curriculum should be examined and analysed into the ideas to be organised and the habits to be formed, and that the methods used must be adapted to the end to be attained. If habits are to be formed, then the procedure must be what psychol- ogy dictates as being in accord with the laws of habit-formation. The ethics of habit.— Chapter XII is devoted to the subject of habits and morals, but a brief, general statement is not out of place here. From what has been said above, it is evident that habit plays the same role in all forms of action, whether of moral significance or not. All the moral actions of our ma- ture life will have habit as their basis. The impor- tant function of habit here can not be better ^3c- HABIT 135 pressed than in the classic words of James :* ''Habit is thus the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repul- sive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through the winter ; it holds the miner in his darkness, and nails the countryman to his log-cabin and his lonely farm through all the months of snow ; it protects us from invasion by the natives of the desert and the frozen zone. It dooms us all to fight out the battle of life upon the lines of our nurture or our early choice, and to make the best of a pursuit that disagrees, because there is no other for which we are fitted and it is too late to begin again. It keeps different social strata from mixing. Already at the age of twenty-five you see the profes- sional mannerism settling down on the young com- mercial traveler, on the young doctor, on the young minister, on the young counsellor-at-law. You see the little lines of cleavage running through the char- acter, the tricks of thought, the prejudices, the ways of the 'shop', in a word, from which the man can by and by no more escape than his coat sleeve can sud- denly fall into a new set of folds. On the whole, it is best that he should not escape. It is well for the world that in most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster and will never soften ajrain." *W. James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. I, p. 121. 136 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Laws of habit-formation. — The perfection and defi- niteness acquired in the process of habituation de- pend directly upon the number of attentive and pleasurable repetitions and inversely upon the num- ber of exceptions. These facts may be expressed in the formula, Perfection and Repetitions X vividness X pleasure denniteness of = p exceptions response ^ DAYS » 5 - l» IS 20 25 30 J5 40 45 50 55 60. ITabltuatlon curves. The dotted line shows the improvement In accuracy and the continuous line shows the increase in speed, brought about by daily practice with the typewriter. Repetition. — The process of habituation brings about, as we have seen, on the biological side, some sort of neuro-mascular reorganisation that definitely and mechanically connects stimulus and response, and, on the psychological side, the dropping of the action from focal to lower level attention. In this development repetition is one of the most important factors. If, for example, we wish to establish the connection between stimulus X and response Y, we HABIT 137 must get the response in the first place, and then have it repeated over and over again for days and months, and in some cases years. This repetition serves to mechanise the process. Other things equal, the greater the number of repetitions, the more perfect and mechanical do the physiological processes be- come and the less conscious value do they have. These two factors, the physiological and the mental, vary inversely. The more definite and mechanical the habit becomes, the less of conscious value it has. This inverse relation of consciousness (C) and me- chanisation (M) and their mutual dependence upon repetition (R) may be expressed in the formula, R = p . These formulas can be true, of course, only in a general way, and are given in the hope of aiding the student to hold in mind the general tendencies of the factors involved in habit-formation. The data necessary for making these formulas mathematically exact are not yet available. Sufficient experimental work has been done to show that within certain limits mechanisation bears a direct relation to repetition. However, if we measure mechanisation by speed and accuracy, it does not ordinarily proceed evenly. There are usually periods of rapid mechanisation followed by periods of slow mechanisation. If we take the average daily progress, then we can have a definite formula to express it, — repetition equals mechanisation multiplied by a constant. And al- though the mechanisation, so far as we can measure it, proceeds by jumps, it doubtless is fairly uniform if only we can keep the conditions constant. And the so-called "plateaus" of learning are doubtless as 138 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY effective in producing mechanisation as are the repe- titions that actually show the improvement. So that we are probably justified in taking the average daily improvement as the rate of mechanisation. But we do not have sufficient data to enable us to speak with confidence concerning the decrease of attention to the act in process of habituation. We know in a general way that the action steadily passes to a lower level of attention, but the exact statement of the quantita- ive aspects of this passage from the focus of atten- tion to a lower level awaits a careful introspective analysis. One of the best illustrations of the effect and use of repetition comes from childhood and is due to imita- tion. Children, as we saw in chapter IX, are imi- tators. The desire and tendency to reproduce what they see done is one of the strongest and most impor- tant aspects of their nature. What interests us here is not merely the fact that they imitate, but that they repeat the imitative process over and over. We have already pointed out that imitation is the result of natural selection. In the evolution of our race the individuals that imitated survived because of the fol- lowing fact : repeated imitation of the actions of the grown people about them led to the formation in the children of habits of response that served to adjust them to their environment. Here we have an aspect of child nature essentially instinctive, whose func- tion is the formation of a system of habits that will serve as an adequate adjustment in a social life so complex that special instincts no longer sufficiently serve the individual's needs. Language, for example, is an important factor in social and civilised life. The HABIT 139 basis of language is habit; the matter of acquiring language is almost entirely one of imitation. The child, usually within the first year, begins to repeat the sounds that he hears, — over and over again he says them, — mamma, mamma, mamma, and papa, papa, papa, etc., perhaps hundreds of times a day. And in the second year, as the names of things are learned, the sight or sound of an object serves to call forth its name, and the child is not satisfied with say- ing it once, but must repeat it, often many times. This process soon gives a child control of a language. Nature is an efficient teacher. A study of her methods reveals the fact that persistent, unending repetition is one of her important methods. The effects of repetition may be further shown by a consideration of the learning of typewriting. In typewriting the idea or perception of a certain word is followed by striking certain keys in a certain order. At first the performance is slow and uncertain, but by continued repetition the learner improves in speed and accuracy; more and more definite and mechanical becomes the response, less and less con- sciousness attends the movements. The repetition leads to the mechanisation of the movement, with the freeing of consciousness from attending to it. In the early period of learning consciousness is engrossed with the movements, and the meaning of the words written is not focal for attention. In this stage the management of the typewriter demands all the atten- tion of the learner. Gradually the movements con- cerned in striking the keys and operating the ma- chine become mechanical and drop to a low level of attention ; then the meanings of the words may be- 140 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYOHOLOQT come objects of the focal processes for consciousness. As a result of repetition, then, the operation of the ma- chine is more rapid and accurate, and at the same time demands less attention. Repetition in attention. — Not only must a process be repeated to secure habituation, but mechanisation is more quickly secured if the repetitions at first are vividly present in consciousness. For repetitions to be most effective the action must be focal in attention. In other words, the more we attend to a process at first, the earlier we can afford to neglect attending to it ; and the less attention to the movements in the process of learning, the longer the process of habitu- ation. Repetition, then, to be most valuable must be at the height of attention. One reason why the imita- tive repetition of the child is so effective is because it involves the child's whole consciousness, — his whole being goes into his act. And one reason why the work of the school room is so ineffectual is because it does not involve the whole consciousness, but is often done on a low level of attention, while other processes occupy the focus. Pleasurable repetition. — Intimately connected with the fact of attention is that of interest. An in- teresting performance is one performed with accom- panying or resultant pleasure. The higher the affect- ive value of a repetition, the more it contributes to habituation. This factor, as well as attention, gives value to imitative repetition. The child not only gives his whole attention to what he does, but he takes immense pleasure in it. His whole being goes into the performance; there is nothing of a half- hearted nature about it. The natural activities of HABIT 141 early life that are the expression of the maturing instincts are always pleasurable. It is for this rea- son largely that, as the child repeats his actions in play and imitation, he quickly acquires great facility. In our more or less blind and awkward attempts to secure repetition in later life we seldom approach the conditions of attention and interest that are com- mon in the spontaneous activities of childhood. But the key to success in teaching is, without doubt, to use the method of nature that underlies the education of our earlier years. Fortunate is the teacher who has had the opportunity to observe the growing child. Consider, for example, a child learning to feed itself in the early part of its second year. He manipulates the spoon with great awkwardness, he gets little food from it, but he insists on feeding him- self none the less. Great is the joy that he gets from it and great is the attention that he gives to it. The same fact is noticed when children are learning to dress themselves. They often show great anger if some one fastens a button for them, although it may save them a great deal of time. The act of dressing and undressing gives them much pleasure when they are just learning the performance. It is easy to see how natural selection would develop such qualities. A child that took no delight in feeding or dressing itself would never learn to do these things and would have a poor chance of survival. The child is a crea- ture of instinct. The instincts have a high affective value, therefore the instinctive repetitions of early life quickly lead to habituation. This fact is sug- gestive for education. If we can graft our habits upon some instinct or other, their formation is easy 142 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY because of tlie above facts. Since inattentive, unin- teresting repetition is largely ineffectual, those who undertake the direction of habit-formation must seek to identify the desired response with some instinct or some great natural need of the child. Two further facts must be mentioned in this con- nection. Since the value of a repetition depends on its pleasurableness and vividness, drill periods and practice periods should be short and often repeated, for if the repetition coutinues for any great length of time it takes place without attention and pleasure. The effectual drill is short and performed at the highest point of mental efficiency and often repeated. This is an important fact for teachers to learn, for much of drill work has been a monotonous 'grind' that accomplished next to nothing. The second fac- tor that is important here is that of fatigue. When fatigue sets in, attention and pleasure ordinarily decline, unless large instinctive resources are being drawn upon. For children, ten or fifteen minutes are quite enough for practice at one time, and in the case of adults there is a large decrease in efficiency in the latter part of an hour's practice or drill. Habit and attitude. — Habit has an important rela- tion to attitude, probably because of the relation of attitude to attention and pleasure. One of the laws of attention is that what fits into one's attitude, one's general mood or frame of mind, will attract atten- tion. Since attention is necessary to valuable repe- tition, it is important that children have the proper frame of mind before practice begins. Another as- pect of attitude is verj significant : When one has a habit in process of formation, and allows an excep- HABIT 143 tion to occur, it often results in a complete change of attitude toward the act involved. One changes, in such a case, from an attitude of certainty and con- fidence to one of uncertainty, from strength to wealmess. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR FTIRTHEIl STTJDY. 1. Make a list of acts performed In a day that may be called habits. Indicate, in each case, the stimulus and the response. 2. Point out the physiological and psychological results of habit- uation for each habit enumerated in answer to No. 1. 3. Illustrate, from your own experience, the laws of habit for- mation as expressed in the two formulas in the chapter. Take account of attention, pleasure, repetition, exceptions. 4. Have you ever habituated an act that was at first unpleasant ? If so, did the unpleasantness disappear? Did the act become pleasant later? 5. Do you now perform any habitual act that is unpleasant? Is the unpleasantness due to the act itself or to attending circum- stances? Cite all the evidence you can that seems to show that the statement of the text concerning the pleasurableness of habitual acts is not true. 6. Mention some habitual acts that are devoid of all feeling. Are they not far on the way toward automatisms? 7. Name some of your oldest habits. How do they compare with instincts in their definiteness? 8. Apply the principles laid down in the chapter by experiment- ing for one mouth in forming a habit. Keep a complete record of the whole experiment. If it is possible to do so, plot a curve show- ing the progress in mechanisation, using speed and accuracy as criteria of mechanisation. Before beginning the experiment make an outline of it and hand in to the instructor for criticism. 9. Give from your own experience illustrations showing the effect of attitude on habit. 10. Give illustrations of habit in domestic animals. How were the habits formed? 11. Suppose that a person is practicing on the violin and the arms get tired, although attention and pleasure are still main- tained. Can the practice be continued profitably? and if so, how long? If not, why not? 12. Suppose a bad habit has been broken for several years. Is there any danger of backsliding? 13. Plan a method of breaking a habit that has become an automatism. 14. Do you think a person learning to play the piano can prac- tice profitably for three or four hours at a time? 144 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 15. Have you ever formed a habit against your will? 16. How account for the fact that some people are better teach- ers when young than when they are older and have habituated their various procedures? 17. Give illustrations of various professional habits. Make a list of professional mannerisms that you notice in a day. 18. Find what percentage of people over 40 have changed the religion of their early days. 19. Is there such a thing as a habit of thought? Explain fully. 20. Can one repetition form a habit? Explain. 21. Do habits work against progress? Show how they may work for progress. 22. Have you known of old people changing their place and manner of living? If so, give account of the results. 23. What aspect of habit formation is most difficult? Answer from your experience. 24. Are there any habits not based directly on instinct? 25. Can you give apparent exceptions to the statement that habituation gives confidence? 26. In the formation of a habit, what makes it possible to couple up the response and stimulus the first time? Illustrate. 27. Deal out a pack of cards according to a certain scheme until you have acquired considerable speed, then deal them according to a diflferent scheme and note the interference of the first habit, 28. If you have ever carried a watch for a long time and then changed the watch to a different pocket, what was the result? Give other illustrations of similar nature. 29. Did you ever remove your coat to prepare for dinner and continue to undress as if preparing to retire? What is the prin- ciple illustrated by such a procedure? If a man remove his vest In the daytime, he is almost sure to wind his watch. Why is this? 30. Are people who marry late in life as likely to get along well together as those who marry earlier? What principles are in- volved? 31. Attention often interferes with the performance of an habitual act. Why is this? 32. Can you give an illustration showing the relation of habit to sickness? 33. Why is it difficult to form new habits late In life? EEPERENCES. FOR GENERAL TREATMENT : W. James, Principles of Psychology, Vol. i, Ch. iv; Psycliology, Briefer Course, Ch. x ; in Popular Science Monthly, Vol. xxx, p. 433; Talks to Teachers, 1906, Ch. viii ; S. H. Rowe, Habit-Forma- tion, 1909, Chs. i-v; B. R. Andrews, Habit, in American Journal of Psychology, xiv, p. 121 ; W. C. Bagley, The Educative Process, 1905, Ch. vll ; J. R. Angell, Psychology, 1908, pp. 66-74 ; C. H. Judd, Psy- chology, 1907, Ch. viil; R. M. Yerkes, Introduction to Psychology, HABIT 145 1911, pp. 401-408; P. Radestock, HaMt and Its Importance in Edu- cation, translated by F. A. Caspari, 1886, still worth reading ; E. L. Thorndike, The Principles of Teaching, 1906, p. 110; E. A. Kirk- patrick, Genetic Psychology, 1909, pp. 111-126. ORIGINAL STUDIES: W. L. Bryan, On the Development of Voluntary Motor Ability, in American Journal of Psychology, Vol. V. p. ]25; W. L. Bryan and N. Harter, Studies on the Telegraphic Language: The Acquisition of a Hierarchy of Habits, in Psycho- logical Review, Vol. vi, p. 345; E. J. Swift, Mind in the Making, 1908, Ch. vi ; also Studies in the Psychology and Physiology of Learning, in American Journal of Psychology, Vol. xiv, p. 201 ; W. F. Book, The Psychology of SJcill, with Special Reference to Its Acquisition in Typetcriting, 1908 ; W. G. Anderson, Studies in the Effects of Physical Training, in American Physical Education Re- view, Vol. iv, p. 2G5 ; J. H. Bair, The Practice Curve, in Psycholog- ical Review, Monograph Supplement, No. 14 (1902) ; T. L. Bolton, Relation of Motor Power to Intelligence, in American Journal of Psychology, Vol. xiv, pp. 622-631. Chapter XI. HABIT AND EDUCATION. The nature of habit and the principles that under- lie its formation have already been set forth. In this chapter we shall consider the problems that arise in the application of these principles. The function of the teacher. — It is worth while to get a clear notion of what the teacher can do to assist the young in the formation of habits. (1) First of all, the teacher should know clearly the nature of the habits to be formed; he should have a thorough knowledge of the curriculum, and, as Dr. Rowe has pointed out, know the nature of its different parts ; know what is largely a matter of ideas to be acquired and what is largely a matter of habits to be formed. Every branch of study has both aspects, both a knowledge side and a skill side. But some branches, as history, literature and science, are predominantly matters of ideas, information ; while others, as draw- ing, painting, singing, reading, writing, much of mathematics, are largely matters of skill to be ac- quired. The teacher must have this broad and funda- mental knowledge of the course of study and of the nature and relation of its various parts in order to be able understandingly to direct the work of the pupil. In addition to this general knowledge, he should be able to analyse a subject into its various elements and know well the object of each step, each lesson in the pupil's progress. For example, if the [146] HABIT AND EDUCATION' 147 object of a lesson is to automatise a part of the mul- tiplication table, then one procedure is required; if, on the other hand, the object of the lesson is to learn the cause of eclipses, a different procedure is re- quired. Here, of course, we are concerned only with those studies or parts of studies that involve the for- mation of a habit. Suppose, then, the teacher knows the object of a lesson to be the formation of a habit ; his next duty is (2) to explain the habit desired to the pupils. It may be that usually certain ideas are first to be developed, then processes habituated. After the development of the ideas, the teacher should ex- plain and demonstrate each step in the processes that are to be habituated. To illustrate, suppose the lesson is to learn how to extract square root. What square root is, is first explained, then the various steps in finding it are worked out and clearly demon- strated. The teacher must have in mind a well de- fined method and adhere to it after first explaining and justifying it. In the case of young pupils, pro- cedures will often be learned before the principles underlying the processes are known, but this does not concern us here and has nothing to do with the formation of the habit. In any case, the teacher should fully explain and demonstrate the separate steps in their proper order. In the example cited the procedure might be: (a) point off the number into periods of two figures each; (b) find the largest number whose square is not larger than the first period; (c) put this down as the first figure of the root; (d) square this figure and subtract the square from the first period of the number; (e) bring down the next period; (f) for a trial divisor, annex a 148 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY cipher to the root found and double it; (g) find how many times this trial divisor is contained in the pres- ent dividend, making allowance for the completed divisor ; this gives the next figure of the root, and it is then substituted for the cipher in the trial divisor, giving the completed divisor, (h) wliich is then mul- tiplied by the new figure of the root and the product subtracted from the dividend; proceed as before. Every particular of the procedure is to be explained and made clear by abundant illustration, and to be sure that the pupils understand it, before they are put to work at solving problems by themselves, the teacher should have them solve a few problems while he is present to correct the mistakes. This brings us to the next function of the teacher, which is (3) to set the pupils right and correct the errors that they make at the beginning of the process of habituation. Neither the teacher nor the pupil knows whether the pupil understands a process until the latter is put to the test. Therefore the economical way is to set the learner right at the start, to take infinite pains at the beginning. (4) Closely allied to the preced- ing is the matter of requiring the pupil to master important details in the series of processes. Quite often complex habits are not well formed because the pupils are not kept long enough on the separate and important details. Ease of performance is never attained till the details are mastered and habituated. Children are content to stop practice with a fair degree of mastery, and too often the teacher is will- ing that they should, but he can render one of his greatest services by holding the children to the mas- tery of all essential details in the process to be habit- HABIT AND EDUCATION 149 Tiated. (5) The teacher can greatly assist the child by supplying a motive for acquiring the habit in question. This is what Dr. Rowe calls getting initia- tive. The teacher can help here by making clear to the pupil the necessity of the habit in question. In- deed, the pupil can be made to feel this need very keenly by finding his equipment inadequate to his needs and by noting the ease by which others who have formed the habit can do what he himself can not do. In addition, the teacher can see that the child reap the benefit of every little advance toward habit- uation and be allowed the satisfaction that comes from achievement. He can do much also by words of encouragement, by calling attention to progress, and in other ways inducing good feeling in the child. Repetition, practice. — The problem of drill is one of the most difficult that the teacher ever has to meet. It takes a great amount of practice to make a skilful performer at anything, — the pianist, typewriter, stenographer, accountant become expert by long and persistent practice. Ease, accuracy and speed in spelling, reading, writing, adding, etc., come only at the cost of much energy spent in drill, in repetition. By drill here we do not mean merely formal drill, but any and all manner of repetitions by which the process becomes fixed. As far as establishing the habit is concerned, it makes no difference whether the repetitions are in the form of formal drill or are made a necessary part of some larger performance ; no difference so long as the psychological and phys- iological conditions that have been mentioned are maintained. There is no reason why the schools should try to get away from all drill and practice 150 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY pure and simple. Where drill can be carried on at the highest point of efficiency, and the drill is neces- sary for the fixing of a habit, there is no use bother- ing about making the drill merely incidental, unless there are other considerations. Those who claim that drill should be merely incidental certainly have no right to say that they are following the method of nature, for nearly all the time of the early years of childhood is spent in continuous repetition of whatever the child is able to do. The problems pre- sented by drill are many, such as the length, fre- quency, conditions and kinds. Experimental psy- chology can not yet fully answer all the questions involved. As already indicated, the drill period should be short; not longer than a high degree of attention and interest can be maintained. Vigorous drill can hardly occupy a period of an hour for an adult, and for children the period is much less, the length depending on age and individual differences. A half-hour of attention sustained at the highest point does pretty well for adults, and half that time for children. The proper frequency for drills or practice is not yet determined. Although it seems probable, in the light of recent experiments, that daily practice periods are better than practice twice a day or on alternate days. It is probably true that for adults two half-hour periods of practice daily are better than one single hour period. But, one practice a day, to the point of fatigue, is prob- ably best. It is not economical, as regards the total amount of time, to push practice to an early conclusion. The formation of a habit is to some extent a growth, and growth takes time. A neuro-muscular organisation is involved, and a cer- HABIT AND EDUCATION 151 tain amount and frequency of repetition are most favorable for this organisation. Pushing a habit to an early fixation may sometimes be necessary and desirable, but it is not economical from the point of view of total amount of time. After a child has prac- ticed an act for a certain length of time, further prac- tice at that time is nearly useless; so also is prac- ticing useless till an interval has elapsed. Teachers probably make a mistake when they try to perfect a habit in a short time. In the light of our present knowledge, it would probably be the best procedure to keep up frequent and vigorous drill for a time and then allow some days for a rest. But drill should not be finally dropped till a fair degree of fixity is at- tained. The conditions of drill are important, inas- much as they must always be such as to furnish the proper degree of interest and attention. All the at- tending circumstances may be varied, b''it the act itself must not be varied. Two times three must always be six, but it can be six in a great variety of situations. Children should always be fresh for practice periods, and the most favorable times of the day should be taken for them. It is much easier to maintain attention and interest in presenting new ideas than it is in repeating what has already been done. And a teacher will save much time and energy by carefully distributing the periods of practice and varying the conditions so as to maintain the proper mental attitude for the right results. Dr. Rowe has given some good, practical directions for aiding pupils that have a habit to form. He suggests that a definite number of repetitions be set for a definite time and place. If, for example, the matter is a new 152 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY trick in arithmetic to be habituated, a definite number of problems should be set to be solved at a definite time and place. And it is doubtless well to go into just such details as these. It is not sufficient after establishing a new principle to say, ' * Now you must practice this." But rather the teacher should say, '* Tonight, at eight o'clock, go into your room, where it is quiet, and do this ten times. ' ' Exceptions. — The psychology of exceptions has already been discussed, but a word on the application of these principles is in order. The teacher has two important duties here. The tremendous importance of preventing exceptions should be made plain to the pupils. And, in addition, the teacher can do much to help the child in preventing exceptions; he can help the child to start with great impetus ; he can help to remove temptations in the early stages of fixation, and by appealing to other interests and instincts he can help to maintain ambition for success. Older children can be helped much by having the principles of habit-formation explained to them, and none of these principles is of more importance, perhaps, than that of allowing no exceptions. As soon as children are old enough for the knowledge to be of any worth to them it should be given to them. The teacher can give this information and give help in the various ways indicated to enable them to put the principles to successful use. Parents, particularly mothers, seem never to realise the significance of exceptions, for every day they can be seen to display the great- est ignorance or folly. After weeks of training in some habit a child is allowed to make a flagrant ex- ception, thereby undoing the effect of practice. In HABIT AND EDUCATION 153 the formation of a habit nothing is so important as absolute regularity, and nothing so detrimental to success as exceptions. Therefore both teachers and parents should be careful in the planning of habits to be formed, but when the work is once determined upon and begun the course outlined should be pur- sued with the determination of a bulldog and with the regularity of planetary motion. Suppose, for the sake of an illustration, that the matter under- taken is to put a baby to bed and have it go to sleep there without any further attention. The thing is easy enough to do, but suppose that after a few weeks the mother takes the child out of its bed to fondle it ; the good work is all undone, and it is usually harder to get the baby back into the old habit of quietly going to sleep than it was in the beginning. And it is not much different with older people. The very essence of habit is its regularity and definiteness, and it can not be established except by regular and definite procedure. There is nothing doubtful or mysterious about habits ; they are as definite and as dependent upon known factors as are the things of the physical world. And it is just as necessary that one proceed in accordance with the principles in- volved in the case of habit as it is in such a matter as building a bridge. One could not build a bridge without taking accoimt of such principles as gravita- tion, adhesion, friction, expansion and contraction, etc.; but if one take into account all the principles and facts involved, one can plan a bridge in every detail and be confident of the outcome of the con- struction. The situation is not very different in forming a habit. If one practice under the proper 154 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY conditions and allow no exceptions to occur, there is great certainty, allowing for individual differences, of what the outcome will be. AVe know what will be the outcome of three months of practice on the type- writer one hour each day. If the proper kind of practice prevails and the subject maintains the proper attitude and health, the outcome is certain. There will be some individual difference due to na- tive capacity, but we could predict what the average speed and accuracy attained would be. And, more than this, the psychologist could determine by an hour's test what would be the outcome in individual cases. If we are to work intelligently in the matter of habit-formation, then, teachers and parents must know the laws involved, and as soon as it is worth while these laws must be made known to the children themselves. And along with the effects of practice comes the effect of an exception. The great impor- tance of even a single exception is due to the effect it has upon feeling and attitude. It is not so much that the exception opens up another path of motor discharge as that it may change the attitude and feel- ing of the individual. Rules for habit-formation. — In James* well known chapter on Habit he lays down some rules for guid- ing one in the process of habit-formation. These rules and principles are elaborated in Eowe's book on habit-formation, constituting the main part of the volume. They have already been treated in our dis- cussion of the laws of habit, but it may be well to bring them together here in the form of rules for the guidance of the student. The rules may be stated in the form of simple commands: (1) Get initiative. HABIT AND EDUCATION 155 (2) Get practice. (3) Allow no exceptions. Little further need be said concerning them, for they are based upon all the facts and principles that we have been considering. By initiative we mean motive and desire. There is no use to start in to form a habit unless we can put our whole being into it. We must see a reason for the habit and really desire it; we must have a purpose, an end in view. Initiative is supplied mainly from instinct and habits already formed, as well as from the feelings. Therefore, in looking for initiative, we must call the roll of the in- stincts to see which are available for functioning in this capacity, then we must call the roll of the feel- ings. These are the native sources, the main wells from which we can draw, but we can also call upon the needs and desires that we have built up and that have a basis of habit. This initial motive power may come, then, from our fighting instinct, our social in- stinct, the collecting instinct, from love, sympathy, etc., as well as from the many needs that arise as a result of our previously formed habits. An illustra- tion or two will make the point sufficiently clear. Let us take the matter of punctuality at school. Initia- tive might be based upon any number of instincts, emotions and habits. A child might want to come on time so that he could beat some other person's rec- ord, or so that his room might beat the record of another room, — the fighting instinct. He might want to come early in order to be with the other children ; there might be a social five minutes, the first thing in the morning, — this would appeal to the social in- stinct. He might want to come early in order to show collections, or to do some constructive work, or 156 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY in order to see how nmch a plant had grown over night. Or, finally, it might be merely in response to the request of a teacher that is loved. Some of these motives will work for one child and some for another, some at one time and some at another. It is seldom that a tactful teacher can not find some way to arouse initiative. And when children are older it is seldom that they can not 'get up steam' in preparation for the formation of a habit. The factors concerned in practice have been discussed already. We have seen that practice there must be ii there is to be a habit. To be most effective it must be when the body is in good condition, and must stop short of fatigue. For this reason the practice intervals should be short, the length of time depending upon the age of the indi- ■\ddual. One should have stated and definite times for practice. The practice must be at the highest point of efficiency; it must be attentive practice. It may be well to give some illustrations and sugges- tions to show how these rules may be observed. In the matter of initiative it is well when we start in to form some important habit to tell our friends so that we may have their encouragement to strengthen our initiative and to help us to prevent exceptions. It is a good idea to identify the desired habit with some other aspect of life so that the latter is available to strengthen initiative. Identifying a habit with other important interests not only gives initiative, but serves to keep the habit in mind, and thereby leads to practice and prevents exceptions. For securing practice there are many devices, such as signs and mottoes put up about our rooms ; then, also, the speci- fying the time and place and manner and amount of practice is helpful in securing practice and prevent- HABIT AND EDUCATION 157 ing exceptions. Suppose the habit desired be rising at an early hour. VVe must make thorough prepara- tion in the way of initiative ; we must really want to do it and have a reason for doing it. To be sure of making a good start, we can have some one call us at the desired minute, and can also have an alarm clock. We must be sure to get up exactly on time, and must allow no exceptions, especially in the early stage. Even if it is Sunday morning and it is rain- ing, and there is no earthly use for rising at the early hour, the exception must not be made. Suppose, again, one is trying to break up the habit of smoking : one should announce it to one's friends, and should even seek frequent opportunities of being offered cigars, firmly refusing them, saying that one is no longer smoking. It is surprising what the outcome is. However, if there is any doubt about the outcome in such a case, it would be better to take an opposite course by starting in on the habit at a time when it would be impossible to get tobacco for some days. One of the most difficult things to do is to break up an automatism, an act that has gone below the con- scious level. The trouble is that one performs the act before one is aware of it. The way to success is to hit upon some plan of bringing the act to con- sciousness. The device must depend upon the par- ticular habit in question. A pupil of the author's once succeeded in breaking the habit of biting the lips that had existed since childhood. The plan used was to bite the lips consciously and say, *'Now I must not bite my lips." By doing this for several times it came about that when she would bite the lips these verbal ideas would come to her mind and finally 158 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY enabled her to refrain from the act. A little practice and experimentation on the part of a teacher will soon reveal to him in a vivid fashion the facts and principles of habit-formation, and much better fit him for the direction of such work by his pupils. Habits are specific. — There is no such thing as the transfer of training. A habit is a habit ; it will func- tion where it will function, and that is the end of its usefulness. It may very well be that one habit will function in a much larger sphere of life than will others ; the field of usefulness of some habits may be much restricted, while that of others is large. Whether there be general habits depends upon what we mean by the term. It is the nature of a habit to be specific. That is what constitutes it a habit, — defi- nite response to a definite situation. There is a sense, however, in which habits of honesty, truthful- ness, etc., are general, but the thing that is general is the situation, — as long as the situations are meas- urably similar we may have the habitual response, but it usually happens that a variation in the situa- tion fails to bring the usual response. For example, such a thing as the habit of neatness may fail to function when the pupil works under a different teacher, or perhaps in a different subject. In the strict sense, then, there can be no such thing as formal discipline or general training, but at the same time we say this, we must say that there may be habits formed in connection with certain subjects of study that will function in many more situations of life than will those that are built up in connection with other subjects. If one study an ancient language, he will form many habits that will function in the study HABIT AND EDUCATION 159 of at least some of the modem languages, but they might mifit one in the study of some of them. It, indeed, often happens that the training acquired in one field may unfit one for work in another field. It is the author's experience, for example, that the habits of procedure formed by a student of philos- ophy unfit him for the study of experimental psychol- ogy. For in the latter one must proceed by the slow inductive method of experimental science. The phil- osophic mind, accustomed to work things out a priori^ is too impatient to sit down and work out facts as a basis for its conclusions. As a rule, in every profes- sion, one finally acquires a certain way of attacking his problems, a certain mode of approach. One sees this in the lawyer, the physician, the scientist. The lawyer asks, "How have similar cases been decided!'* The doctor asks, ''"What disease have we here? What is its effect on the individual? What drug counter- acts this effect?," etc. So it turns out that whatever one's calling, one soon comes to have a definite \\ay of meeting the usual situation that confronts him, a procedure that works under ordinary circumstances, but that may not be adequate for different situations. Habits, then, of both mental procedure and physical procedure are rather specific. The question, there- fore, of the relative value of the different studies turns on what sort of habits we wish to acquire. A study of mathematics will form the habit of looking for the quantitative aspect of things. The study of natural and physical science will develop the habit of looking for the causal aspects of things. Since all must have at least something to do with both aspects 160 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY of the world, all should study mathematics as well as science. The fact that quantitative relations are nearly always important is what gives to mathe- matics its great value, not that it has any general dis- ciplinary effect upon the mind. When we are con- cerned only with the qualitative aspects of things, mathematics is of no importance ; it might even unfit us for our task. For example, it is quite possible that the mathematical habit that must balance every equation might unfit one for getting the general tendency out of a great mass of data ; might unfit one for making daring generalisations that often lead to great progress in science. Of course, finally in every science mathematics must come in and have its inning. We alwaj'^s come around finally to ask the question, liow much? But there are stages in the de- velopment of science when this question can not be put for the reason that it can not be answered and is not yet of as much importance as the question, what? In psychology, for example, we have first to ask, what? Our first problem is that of analysis. From the point of view of habit, therefore, the duty of the teacher is to assist the pupil in the formation of habits that will enable him to meet the various situations that will confront him in the life that he will have to lead. Inasmuch as we live in the same society, there are many habits that should be the same for all. This is our general culture, so called. Inas- much as we must do different things, we must have different habits. This constitutes our special train- ing. The carpenter and the doctor should have com- mon habits of honesty and truthfulness, but the car- HABIT AND EDUCATION 161 penter must be expert at driving nails, while the doc- tor must be expert at making pills. The fact that training is specific can hardly be too much empha- sised. In planning courses of study, while, of course, we should not lose sight of ideals and knowledge, we should work out very carefully what forms of skill the training is going to provide and whether this skill will be what the future environment will de- mand of the child. The school has made many of its greatest mistakes in believing, without carefully working the matter out, that it was giving training that would meet the demands of the future. The teacher worked on in the hope that he was giving a training that some day would be useful. There has been too much vagueness, too much done under the vague name of 'culture.' "What we need is a careful analysis of the future needs of the child in the life that he is to live, and then a careful planning of the habits and ideals that he will need in that life. Then the developing of these ideals and the forming of these habits is the work of the school. If one wishes to know how much vagueness there is in this regard, let him ask the average Latin teacher why a student should study Latin. We need to clear our school curriculums of a lot of rubbish and plan a curriculum in the light of modern conditions and modern needs. Everything that we cannot justify should be thrown out, and this justification should be future useful- ness, whether the matter be ideas or habits. Of course, usefulness must have a liberal interpretation, not merely a monetary one. We should have in mind the best sort of life in the best sort of society. 162 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR rURTHER STUDY. 1. Make a list of those studies in the curriculum that are chiefly matters of idea getting, and another list of those that are chiefly matters of habit formation. 2. Show that no study is wholly either one or the other. 3. Make a complete outline for the procedure in the formation of a habit related to arithmetic or other school subject. When you, as a teacher, have the opportunity to do so, make a careful record of the results of using such a plan. 4. Compare the amount of time that should be spent in habit getting with the time that should be spent in getting ideas. Will this vary for different grades? 5. Can you give from your own experience an illustration of the principle involved in learning to swim in winter and to skate in summer? How far is this principle true and what is its appli- cation? 6. If the above principle is true, why is it that a pianist can not play as well after failure to practice for a long time? Have you any evidence showing the value of a little rest of a few days or weeks in the midst of vigorous practice in some art? 7. If there is any trick of your early days, — such as tossing up several balls at the same time, — that you have not performed for years, try it now and compare your skill after just a little practice with the skill of your early performance. 8. If knowledge is only to aid and guide in response, should we study in school branches, that which will never be of any practical use to us? 9. Try the experiment of learning some trick by practicing fif- teen minutes a day while another person learns it by practicing thirty minutes a day, then try learning some other trick, reversing the length of practice periods. What do you learn from the experiment? 10. What is the disadvantage of keeping a child in a grade that is too hard or too easy for him? 11. Show how drill can be made incidental in various school branches. 12. Give from your own experience methods that secure atten- tion and interest in drill work in the ditferent school subjects. Note that you have to rely upon some instinct or some strong acquired interest. 13. Is it "teaching a dangerous doctrine" to say that it is diffi- cult to form habits late in life? 14. Indicate the various aspects of a child's life that may be appealed to to get up initiative for the formation of the habit of prompt attendance at school. 15. What devices have you used to keep in mind some act that you wished to make habitual? 16. What value is there in committing to memory short sayings HABIT AND EDUCATION 163 and associating them to certain acts that one wishes to make habitual? 17. From the point of view of habit, what is the function of education? 18. What branches in the high school involve the formation of habits that function generally in life? 19. Name some habits that are fairly general in their applica- bility. 20. Give illustrations to show that, strictly speaking, all habits are narrow and specific. 21. Give from your experience illustrations to show the great harm caused by allowing exceptions to enter in the process of habit-formation. REFERENCES. Jilost of the references given at the end of the preceding chapter treat also of the relation of education to habit. See also : Rowo, Uabit Formation, 1909, Chs. vi-xiii ; P. Radestock, Habit and Its Importance in Education, translated by F. A. Caspari, 1886; W. F. Book, The R6le of the Teacher in the Most Expeditious and Economic Learning, in Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. i, p. 183 ; also his Psychology of Skill, cited in the preceding list; E. J. Swift, Re-learning a Skillful Act, In Psych. Bui., 1907, Vol. vii, p. 17 ; also Learning to Telegraph, In Psych. Bui., Vol. vii, p. 149. On the General Effects of Special Exercise, see: S. H. Rowe, Habit-Formation, 1909, pp. 243-250 ; C. H. Judd, Relation of Special Training to General Intelligence, in Educational Review, Vol. xxxvi, p. 28 ; E. L. Thorndike and R. S. Woodworth, The Influence of Improvement in One Mental Function Upon the Efficiency of Other Functions, In Psychological Revieic, Vol. viii, p. 247 ; J. R. Angell, Formal Discipline in the Light of the Principles of General Psychology, in Educational Review, Vol. xxxvii, p. 1 ; Angell and Coover, General Practice Effect of Special Exercise, in American Journal of Psychology, xviii, p. 328; S. S. Colvin, The Learning Process, 1911, Chs. xiv, xv, xvi. Chapter XII. HABIT AND MORAL TRAINING.* Importance of the problem. — No educational prob- lem is more in need of solution just now than the problem of moral training. Teachers are asking for principles to guide them in their attempt to make good citizens out of their pupils. Parents are calling upon science for knowledge concerning the laws of mental and moral growth, and are looking to psy- chology in particular for information that will help them in training their children. Many people feel that the schools and colleges are not doing all that they can do for the moral development of the young people in them. And it is often said that the schools have made much greater progress in methods that lead to intellectual development than in methods of moral training. Now, there is some truth in these charges, and just in so far as there is truth in tbem, so far is education a failure. Education ought to give efficiency and control. Society demands of parents and the schools young people prepared to do something well, understanding the nature and rela- tions of her fundamental institutions, knowing how to do, each his part, in the great whole ; and, most im- portant of all, trained to do that part. The parents and schools have charge of the individual for about one-fourth of his life. Surely, then, society has the ♦This chapter, in essentially Its present form, was first published in School and Home Education for February, 1910. 1164] HABIT AND MORAL TEAINING 165 right to demand that the individual be given sufficient training to prepare for reliable action in all the com- plex relations of life. Futility of recent discussions. — Recent discussions of the problem of moral training give little help to either parent or teacher. This is largely because the question has been approached from the wrong point of view. For the most part, the writers on this sub- ject concern themselves with religious, ethical and sociological discussions and speculations. Now, the question is not a matter of religion, and all that ethics and sociology can do is to establish the goal, set up the end, to be attained by moral training. But on this point there is already general agreement. Teachers know the kind of citizen that is desired. Every father knows what sort of man he would have his son become. What is wanted by both parents and teachers is information concerning the laivs of mental development, and methods of training planned in harmony with these laws, — methods that will lead to certain, definite, desirable action. Moral training and psychology. — The laws of men- tal development and methods of training planned in accordance with these laws are problems for psychol- ogy. It is to psychology that we must look for the help that everybody desires. What, then, has psy- chology to say? Before attempting an answer, it may be well to state a little more fully the aim of moral training. The question, of course, is: what shall be our criterion for morality? In a general way, we may say that a person has a good moral character who responds to all the various situations of life in a way conducive to the welfare of himself and soci- 166 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY ety. Reduced to its simplest terms, this means ap- propriate response to stimuli, a proper co-ordination of action and perception. What this appropriate re- sponse, this proper co-ordination, is, society always has the right to say, and it says different things at different times. The moral ideal is a growth, is an evolution, just as all other educational ideals are; there is nothing absolute about it. The moral ideal is the conception that society has reached of the ac- tion of its members that will best lead to the good of the whole. This conception changes, but in any gen- eration it must be taken as the guide for the moral training of the young. There is nothing mysterious or mythological in the matter. Society demands — and has the right to demand — that its members be so trained that they will, as the occasion arises, imme- diately and regularly respond in a way beneficial to the general welfare. Given situations demand defi- nite types of action, definite responses. Considering the situation as the stimulus, we may say that the essence of moral training consists in co-ordinating with stimuli their appropriate responses. The prob- lem for psychology is to work out the laws of mental development, and, in the light of these laws, pre- scribe methods for the training of the young, to the end that they may reach the standard set up by society. Psychology is not able at present to give a com- plete solution to the problem, but it is able at least to indicate the nature of the solution. All that we have said in discussing instincts and habits applies to moral training in just the same way as it applies to other training. For psychology, moral training is HABIT AND MOBAL TBAINING 167 the same sort of problem as that of training in gen- eral. It falls under the psychology of action. A per- son of good moral character is one who habitually does the right thing at the right time. Now, the na- ture of habitual action is that it is more or less reflex. Moral training, then, must seek to establish reflex responses to the various situations of life. One of the principles of action is that the more often a cer- tain movement follows upon a given stimulus, the more certainly and easily will it follow with each succeeding presentation of that stimulus. This is the nature of the problem of moral training as psychol- ogy sees it, and this, in outline, is the nature of the solution offered. Must be based on definite principles. — Methods of moral training must be based on established prin- ciples. These principles are, as we have already said, the laws of development. The child is the product of evolution, of ages of development, the result of long conflict with the forces of nature — with wind and storm, seas and mountains, burning heat and great continent-wide glaciers, with earthquakes and all manner of catastrophes. There has been also the conflict with the forms of life from the microscopic bacteria to the huge brutes of tho forest and jungle. And, too, there has been the struggle of man with man, the conflict of muscle and of wit. As the heri- tage of it all, we have the child of today. ''The soul is thus the product of heredity. As such, it has been hammered, moulded, shocked and worked by the stern law of labor and suffering into its present crude form. It is covered with scars and wounds not yet healed. It is still in the rough and patchworky, full 168 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY of contradictions, although the most marvelous of all the products of nature." If we are to know how to train the child aright, we must know something of all this history and the kind of child finally be- queathed to the present. The child is born with a few co-ordinations of re- sponse to stimulus ready formed. As it grows older, many other inherited responses come into play. The child can not escape its ancestry. The hand of the past is upon it. And here our work begins. These inherited responses are our starting point. The first task of psychology, in ^he matter of moral training, is to establish the order and time of appearance of instincts, their relation to one another and to the environment. This we have endeavored to do in the earlier chapters. The principles of the inhibition of movement and the laws governing the formation of habits, also outlined in preceding chapters, are of great service here. The instincts and moral training. — One of the im- portant instincts available for moral training is imi- tation. When about one year of age the child tries to imitate everything it sees. The child does as it sees others do. It responds to situations as it sees others responding. If parents and companions swear when they strike their fingers instead of the nail, so does the child. If they, on certain occasions, respond with angry word or look, so does the child. The child's companions become its models for action. Therefore imitation, as the world long has known, is one of the most important factors available for moral training, as for all other forms of training. Not only must all the instincts be taken into ac- HABIT AND MORAL TBAINING 169 count, but the whole nature of the developing child. The child should lead a natural, healthy life. He should be hammered and moulded by his environment much as his ancestors have been. To this end he should have provided a rich and varied environment. And really all that teachers and parents can do for him is to manipulate this environment. The child is to be taught as far as possible in nature's way. The child should know much of the natural environment : hill and valley, wood and stream, animal and plant, fishing, hunting, swimming and all sorts of out-door experiences and activities. The relations with com- panions should be many, varied and intimate. The child should learn, by experience, the natural conse- quence of action. The environment should be manip- ulated to this end, and only sufficiently to contribute to this end and to the formation of healthy habits of response. The manipulation of the environment must, then, have in view two things : 1. The child is to live a life rich in experience, many sided, full and complete ; 2. The child should always suffer the con- sequences of his action, in terms of pain and pleas- ure, deprivation and reward, loss of freedom and liberty. The child must find on every hand invaria- bility and absolute regularity. A lawful environ- ment means a lawful child. A lawful environment, however, is not one of punishment and harshness only. A large part of this environment should be love and sympathy, for the child is a creature of feel- ing and emotion as well as of will and action. Feel- ing and action are always most intimately associated, and it is quite as important to see that appropriate response reaps its reward in pleasure as to see that 170 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY inappropriate response reaps its reward in pain. The close relation to nature is to be fostered in or- der to develop a healthy, natural animal as the basis of moral action. No actions are intrinsically bad; they should be judged by their results. Children, in their relations with one another, should learn the natural consequence of action, the natural results of given forms of conduct, and be allowed, as far as possible, to suffer this natural consequence, so that this result, this consequence, can have its due influ- ence in determining the next action in the same situ- ation, and so finally lead to the formation of the most desirable co-ordination of response and stimulus. If one picture to oneself the way in which conduct was determined among primitive men, one will get some notion of the way in which conduct should still be determined. Doubtless the hard knocks of primitive man in the fierce conflict with nature and with his fellows led to a very definite sort of response. The child's environment today should be allowed to work out a response no less definite. Every instinct is to be taken account of, some use can be made of every one of them. Even fear has its place, and in the nat- ural course of events will help in bringing about the desired co-ordination. Account must be taken of the instinct of play. In the early years of the child's life it will be of great service in revealing the nature of the world to the child and in securing for him a rich experience, which, as we have said above, is of so much importance. In later childhood and youth it will be of inestimable value in teaching the child how to live in the social organism, teaching him his place and the rights of his fellows. HABIT AND MORAL TRAINING 171 Ideals of action. — Another principle available for moral trainingisthe tendency for action tofollowupon an idea. The idea of an action that has been per- formed will be followed by similar action unless an in- hibiting idea arises. In the presence of a given situ- ation the child will have an idea of an action that he has performed or has seen others perform under the same circumstances. The idea of the action is fol- lowed by the action. This is the beginning of the formation of a reflex response. With continued rep- etition of situation and response, the perception of the stimulus is followed by the response. It is this fact alone that gives any value to moral teaching, to developing ideals of action. The psychological prin- ciple involved is this: a child can be taught that a certain type of situation should give rise to a certain type of action. As a mere matter of memory, when such a situation arises, the individual remembers what sort of action is appropriate; the idea of the action goes over into the action itself. What we should say is that it may do it; the idea goes over to the act, provided there is no inhibiting idea. It is just the fact that there are practically alivays inhib- iting ideas that makes formal moral teaching of so little value. A child could be taught in a few hours the proper sort of actions for a whole lifetime. But afterward the child must have practice in following the idea up by the act, so that inhibiting ideas will not be able to interfere in the future. In fact, what holds with all other forms of training holds here with even greater force. It does not take long to learn the principles involved in any trade or art, but it takes a lot of practice to make one worth anything 172 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY in their practice. So it does not take long to learn all the moral principles, but it takes a good deal of practice before the response and stimulus are very definitely connected. Inhibition. — The principle of inhibition is impor- tant. The first responses to a situation may lead to pain, and in the future the situation may call up the idea of the pain, and this idea of the pain serve to inhibit the sort of response given formerly, and a habit of action eventually be formed quite different from the first response. Much depends on first expe- riences. Almost any sort of response can be acquired for any situation. To draw an illustration from the instinct of fear, a child's reaction to the presence of a certain animal, say a dog, is determined by his first experience with that animal, and it may take a long time for different experiences to vary that type of response. All of the child's responses are subject to the same fortuitous determination. A little care- lessness on the part of parents relative to the early experience of children is apt to lead to the formation of habits of response that will require a world of trouble and patience to undo later. As a rule, no habituated response should be formed that must be radically undone later. Repetition and moral training. — Repetition under- lies habit, and habit is the basis of character. The continued repetition of the same response to the same stimulus fixes the co-ordination, makes it more and more certain and inevitable. It is this principle that makes any kind of training possible. During the period of plasticity of the psychophysical organ- ism it is relatively easy to establish almost any sort .7 HABIT AND MORAL TRAINING 173 of co-ordination. "Without this principle of definite- ness of co-ordination as the result of repetition the formation of character would be impossible, for fix- ity would be impossible, and one could never know how any individual would act in any circumstance. We are, then, to take advantage of our knowledge of the nature of the child and of our power to manipu- late the child's environment in securing the repetition of the desired responses and, as a result of the repe- tition, the formation of definite types of action. In securing this necessary repetition parents and teachers must be the constant associates of the child, leading it through all the various environments and situations. The child gets the cue to his action from them and by repetition comes to do it naturally and as a matter of course. Pain, as the natural outcome of the violation of law, personal or social, is to aid in securing the appropriate response. The right re- sponse is the important thing, and must be secured by any and all means, sometimes even against the will of the child, and compelled by force if necessary. The appropriate response must be secured and continued until it follows as a matter of course. It must be pointed out that such a procedure necessitates that parents be the constant companions of their children. This they can not be if the father is entirely en- grossed with his business and the mother with teas and clubs. Some day we shall learn that the most important business of parents is the education and training of their children, through constant compan- ionship, help and sympathy. The school and the home in moral training. — And when the teacher undertakes a part of the work of 174 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL. PSYCHOLOGY training the child he must proceed in accordance with the same principles. But too much has been turned over to the cchools, too much is expected of them. The home is the natural place for education, but the home has turned over, one after another, almost all of its responsibilities to the schools, and now parents censure the schools for not doing well the things that they themselves have shirked. The child has little business in school before the age of eight, and it is in the first eight years of its life that the foundations of moral training must be laid. If all is well done in these first eight years, there is little to do later, — • little exc3pt to keep the environment favorable for the development of the moral character, whose basis is already laid. The center of gravity of education must be shifted back to the home where it belongs, and parents must assume again the greater part of the responsibility for the moral training of their chil- dren. For this responsibility the parents must be trained. This business of rearing children should be in large measure the function of the mother, and for this great duty she should be especially prepared. "Women are crying for the ballot, for admission into all sorts of occupations and professions where they are not fitted by nature to be. Here is a work that would serve as an avenue for the expenditure of all their energy and ingenuity, a work than which there is no greater, to which they are by nature especially adapted. The whole education of women and all her professional training should be directed toward this end. This training and preparation should include a knowledge of physiology, hygiene and dietetic prin- ciples, nursing and the cure and prevention of dis- HABIT AND MORAL TRAINING 175 ease, plumbing and everything connected with the sanitation of the home, genetic psychology and neu- rology, and everything that a scientific pedagogy can teach concerning the education of children, every- thing that art can teach her that will enable her to beautify the home. All this is for her professional training. For her cultural development she should have the same education as man. If woman will take over and solve this problem of the training and nur- ture of children, she will be doing her full share of labor for society, and should be relieved of her work as shop girl and typewriter. The schools can help in the work of moral training and have their share of the work to do, but the greater burden falls to the home, and will never be well done until it is well done there. Practical moral training. — Moral training is to begin with the birth of the child. It should begin with regularity in feeding, in exercise and in excre- tion. The child should early learn that this is a world of law and order. The lesson of absolute and implicit obedience should be learned early and learned well ; then other training comes more easily. As fast as the child meets the various situations of life and .is capable of responding to them, it should be led to make the correct response. Training can come early in such matters as personal hygiene, relation to other children and older people, polite behavior at the table and even in the general conduct of their lives. In all these matters the child should and can be taught to give immediately the proper response as the various occasions arise. These re- sponses can, by adequate repetition, be made certain 176 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY and definite. To illustrate: A friend arrives, the child's hand extends in greeting; food is passed to the child; it responds with, "I thank you;" the child by accident steps on its neighbor's toes and responds with, ' * I beg your pardon ; ' ' the child gets some candy and puts away a piece ' ' to save for papa ; " a play- mate has an accident and is in pain; the child re- sponds with such aid and sympathy as it knows how to give. In all the various situations of life that con- front the child it is to be led by parents and teachers to make the proper response. By invariable repeti- tion these responses are to be reduced to the realm of habit, and are to fall largely under the control of the lower nerve centers. Most of the situations of childhood are simple, but the principle applies in the more complex relations of later life. Do we not know pretty well how our friends will act on any given occasion and in any sit- uation? To a considerable extent we do, and this is possible only because these friends have been re- sponding in a definite way to such situations all their lives, and it is not possible for them to act otherwise than as they do. It is this definite kind of response, in fact, that constitutes the chief difference between one man and another. Every individual establishes for himself certain forms of response; these become more and more automatic and mechanical ; they come to be a part of the man ; they are to be taken account of in our dealings with him, for they are the man. Now, if an individual is a "bundle of habits," if every one sooner or later acquires pretty definite modes of response to all the situations of life, the question of moral training becomes a very simple one HABIT AND MOEAL TRAINING 177 in theory, however hard it may be to carry it out in practice. All that is required is to bring about on the part of the child the appropriate response, to lead to the formation of such a bundle of habits as will be most conducive to the welfare of the child and society. Moral training, as stated above, turns out to be of the same nature as training in general. Edu- cation as a whole becomes the formation of a "hierarchy of habits." AVe teach a child to say for two plus two, ' ' four ; ' ' for three plus two, ' ' five ; ' ' for two times four, ''eight," and so on. "VVe also teach him to observe closely, think accurately and speak correctly as matters of habit. In music, one learns when one sees a note on a certain part of the scale to strike a certain key on the piano, or to produce a certain tone with the voice. Similarly all training is a matter of bringing about on the part of the one trained definite, habitual responses for definite con- ditions and situations. It may be said that in reaching this conclusion we have made little progress, for the important thing is the method of forming these habitual responses. But surely it is worth while Imowing just what our prob- lem is. We ca-^ never solve it till we are sure of its nature. Once we are agreed that the essential of moral training is habitual response, more or less automatic, we shall be far on our way to the solution of the question of method. We have indicated above the nature of this solution. When our knowledge of the child is more complete, when we can trace better the order of development, we shall be able to pre- scribe pretty definitely the method of moral training. As our knowledge now stands, we can outline the 178 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY essential features of the method, as indicated in the preceding paragraphs. It is also worth while know- ing that nothing new is to be expected. There is nothing new, strange or mythical that a commission or committee of investigation will be able to discover. The fundamental principles of moral training have been known as long as we have known anything. Neither parents nor teachers need expect the discov- ery of some new moral antiseptic, some new pink pill that can be administered three times a day before meals, and that will transform the children into little angels of conduct, thereby giving the parents relief from care and anxiety. Nothing will ever take the place of constant work and watchfulness on the part of parents. They should realise that nothing can take the place of a careful study of the principles involved, a full comprehension of the task, and daily and hourly watchfulness and care in carrying out these principles. The emotions, actions and character. — The moral training which we have in mind includes a proper control of the emotions, the development of endur- ance, bravery, sympathy, patience and self-control. All these characteristics are to be acquired as definite responses to definite situations. We want a race of men for whom crime will be impossible, not because of a moral precept that has been learned, but because I they have never committed crime and it is not in accord with their nature. It is important that early training make the individual a person of prompt ac- tion as soon as the nature of the situation is per- ceived. It is only to such a person that ideals and forms of action can be of any value. Whatever good HABIT AND MORAL TRAINING 179 may come in later youth from the principles of morai action depends entirely on the previous formation of reflex responses. The tendency of the schools has been to separate knowing and doing, while the only reason that we need to know anything is that we may do something. One of the reasons that the schools have been doing so poorly in moral training is be- cause they have omitted acti\^ties from the course of study. Doubtless the failure of parents is in part due to the same cause. A generation ago most homes furnished plenty of activities to serve as a training school for the children. Objections considered. — Several objections might be raised against such a training as we have briefly outlined. It might be said that it would lead to ac- tion without principle, without motive, that the child would have no standards or forms of action. To this it may be replied that it is right action and not a knowledge of principles that is primarily desired. "VVe want men for whom stealing, lying, cruelty, drunkenness, unkindness shall be impossible, just as we want bad language and loose thinking to be im- possible for them, not because of the knowledge of principles of grammar and logic, but because they have always spoken correctly and thought clearly. The drunkard knows that it is wrong to get drunk, the thief knows that it is wrong to steal, the liar knows that he ought not to lie. The ragged tramp as he plods his way along the highway or railroad may have lofty ideals and visions fair, but these ideals and visions are never realised. The thing pri- marily desired is such a correlation of response and stimulus as will make crime impossible, a condition. 180 THE OUTLINES OP EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY that will make the ideal an effective stimulus to ac- tion that leads toward realisation. The only way to have such a condition is to make right and appropri- ate action habitual to men. Many mothers tremble in fear lest their sons go into saloons and become drunkards. It ought to be as easy to train a boy not to go into saloons and other places of immorality as it is for the hunter to train his bird dog not to chase rabbits. Many parents could learn much from dog- trainers. The physiological and psychological prin- ciples of action are the same for man and beast. We do not mean to say that general principles and rules of action are not important, but they are secondary, not primary. They will follow naturally upon a course of training that makes the formation of habit the basis. As the child grows older and remembers and reasons, he comes to generalise on his actions and their results. These memories and generalisations enter into future conditions and situations, and be- come part of the motive, part of the stimulus to action. It might also be objected that it is impossible to train an individual so thoroughly that he will be pre- pared for all the varied and complex situations of later life. But this objection will not hold. If pa- rents and teachers have had the right relation to the child till maturity is reached, adjustments of re- sponse to situation will be formed in about all the normal situations of life. Moreover, if a novel situ- ation should arise in later life, the individual is then a person of memory and reason, as was pointed out above; the situation is immediately compared with past situations ; it becomes a stimulus like such-and- HABIT AND MORAL TRAINING 181 sucli-a-oiie ; the appropriate response appears imme- diately, provided there is a sufficient habit-hasis back of it. It might be further objected that it is not desir- able to reduce conduct to the realm of habit ; that we should seek, on the contrary, to preserve plasticity. The obvious reply is that in the matter of character the less plasticity, the better for society. The trouble with us now is that we are too plastic. We steal one day and lie the next. Where there is plasticity in moral character there is chaos in society. What we need morally is fixity. There should be no place for plasticity when it comes to matters of crime and sin. If we desire that good action should become natural to men, we must make it first a matter of habit, a matter of reflex response. QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR FUBTHER STUDY. 1. Keep a record of your moral acts for a week, indicating those that you think right and those you consider wrong. Why are they right? Why wrong? Why did you do the right acts? Why the wrong acts? 2. Make a list of the ten best men that you know and a list of the ten worst men you know. What is the basis of your classifica- tion? Do the bad men in your list know what is right as well as do the good men? 3. Enumerate the differences between the typical good man and the typical bad man of your above lists. How many of these dif- ferences are there? How long would it take to teach the moral principles involved, — teach them as mere facts? 4. Make a list of the moral principles that you think an ideal man should follow. How few principles will they reduce to, and how long would it take to teach them thoroughly to a child? .5. Do not such considerations as the above make it plain that although the teaching of moral principles may be important, it is insignificant in comparison with the importance of habituation? 6. Is not a person who knows what good conduct is, but has not been trained to do it as a matter of habit, very much like a person who knows how to add and subtract, multiply and divide, but can not solve a single problem without making mistakes because he has not habituated the processes? 182 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 7. Give from your experience illustrations showing the impor- tance of regularity and uniformity In forming a moral habit. 8. Try to observe the training of childx'en in their homes ; report the procedure of parents that seem to understand the laws of habit formation and of some who do not. 9. Give from experience or observation instances of the viola- tion by teachers of the laws of habit formation as applied to morals. 10. Can you prove that mere knowledge of the right is not suffi- cient basis for moral action? 11. Do you think we need to worry about a man's ideals if he always does the right as a result of habituation? 12. Sometimes the children of preachers go wrong, — children that have been preached to and prayed for daily for twenty years. If you know of any such case, can you explain it? 13. What can the school do for a boy fourteen years old, normal mentally and physically, but who has had no moral training, and as a result lies, steals, etc.? If you have ever observed such a case, describe the treatment and the results. 14. Show that in the very same family the children may have the same knowledge of right and wrong, but that some are very much better than others so far as actions are concerned. Why Is this? 15. A few years ago the author went to a town to give a lecture to a body of teachers. The next morning he found the people excited and threatening mob violence. A prominent minister of the town had been put into jail because of a serious crime. The man knew the right, for he had been teaching it to his flock. Why did he not do the right? 16. From your own experience, can you say that the careful study of mathematics or science will have anything to do with one's moral actions? 17. When you have the opportunity as a teacher, try to find evidence of the moral eflfects of school studies. Try to discover the moral effects of the study of literature or history. Is such effect a myth or a fact? Does the manner of teaching have any- thing to do with it? 18. Has any teacher ever had a great moral influence upon your life? If so, describe the matter in detail, giving your age and the exact nature of the moral influence. 19. Carefully consider the moral influence of your father and mother upon your life. Work it out definitely, considering methods and results. 20. Have you ever observed in your own life or the lives of others any definite moral influence from nature study? 21. Is it possible to do very much in the high school in the way of moral training unless it is based on admiration for, and imita- tion of, a strong, forceful, upright teacher? Without such a teacher, would the formal study of ethics have much more value than a microscopic study of earthworms? HABIT AND MORAL TRAINING 183 22. Discuss the relation of religious belief to moral practice. 23. How can parents be made to see that the main work of moral training must fall upon them? And how is it possible for the modern home to do its proper work in this regard? 24. Suppose you are a mathematics teacher in a city high school. What can you do in the way of moral training? Answer from experience, if possible. 25. Have you ever known of a case in which a home has been revolutionised morally through the influence of the school? If so, report in full. 26. Do you think religion necessary in moral training? Give the evidence to support the position that you take. 27. If a systematic course in history and mathematics is neces- sary, why is not a systematic course in ethics necessary? 28. Work out fully the moral influence that may come from the group games of youth. 29. Do you believe that the personal relations of teacher and pupils are more important for moral training than formal teaching of ethics? 30. What plan of building up a moral character was success- fully followed by Benjamin Franklin? Does this give us any idea as to the proper kind of moral training? REFERENCES. F. Adler, Moral Instruction of Children, 1892 ; G. A. Coe, Educa- tion in Religion and Morals, 1904; G. E. Dawson. The Child and His Religion, 1909; C. DeGarmo, Ethical Training in the Public tScJionls, in A^nerican Academy of Political and Social Science, No. •]9 ; Principles of Secondary Education, Vol. iii. Ethical Training, 1911: J. Dewey, Moral Principles in Education, 1909; Teaching Ethics in the High School, in Educational Revietv, Vol. vi, p. 313; E. O. Sisson, The Essentials of Character, 1910; E. E. Kellogg, Studies in Character Building, 1905; H. T. Mark. The Teacher and the Child; M. E. Sadler, Moral Instruction and Training in Scfiool, 1908 ; E. P. St. John, Stories and Story-Telling in Moral and Re- ligious Education, 1910 ; IT. Spencer. Education, Intellectual, Moral and Physical, 1894, still worth reading; D. S. Jordan, Nature Study and Moral Culture, N. E. A., 1890, p. 130; G. Stanley Hall. The Moral and Religious Training of Children and Adolescents, in Ped. Sent., Vol. i. p. 196; Moral Education and Will Training, in Ped. Sem., Vol. ii, p. 72; G. E. Dawson, A Study in Youthful Degen- eracy, in Ped. Sem., Vol. iv, p. 221 ; Mrs. F. Schoff, The Home as the Basis of Civic, Social and Moral Uplift, in Ped Sem., Vol. xvi, p. 473; D. Mussey, The Ideals of Ethical Culture for Children, in Ped. Sem., Vol. xvl, p. 513; G. E. Meyers. Moral Training in the School, in Ped Sem., Vol, xiii, p. 409 ; J. F. Rogers, Physical and 184 THE OUTLINES 0^ EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Moral Training, in Ped. 8em., Vol. xvi, p. 301; L. W. Kline, A Study in Juvenile Ethics, in Ped. Sem., Vol. x, p. 239 ; L. D. Arnett, Origin and Development of Home and Love of Home, in Ped. Sem., Vol. ix, p. 324 ; E. J. Swift, Mind in the Making, 1908, Ch. ii ; M. V. O'Shea, Social Development and Education, 1909, pp. 265- 272 ; H. Miinsterberg, Psychology and the Teacher, 1909, Chs. xx and xxiv ; E. A. Kirkpatrick, Fundamentals of Child Study, Ch. xi ; E. F. Young, Ethics in the School, 1902 ; E. H. Griggs, Moral Edu- cation, 1904; E. A. Sharpe, Foundation Stones of Success, 1910, in three large volumes, containing abundant material for use in devel- oping moral ideals. Chapter XIII. MEMORY. Meaning of memory. — Experiment seems to re- veal two kinds of images : (1) One that has an asso- ciative setting, which gives a feeling of familiarity with it, and (2) an image without any associative setting, and therefore lacking any accompanying feeling of familiarity. The former is called a mem- ory image, the latter an image of imagination. The term memory is used not only to designate this par- ticular kind of image as distinct from the image of imagination, but is also used in the same sense as the term retention. When we speak of the accuracy or fidelity of memory we mean that the image or idea represents accurately the original impression. If our memory is accurate, our idea of a past experi- ence agrees accurately with that experience. On the other hand, when we speak of a good memory or poor memory we have reference rather to the retention; we mean that retention is good or retention is poor. If today we can not recall any of the experiences of yesterday, then we say that our memory is poor, meaning that the impressions are not retained. In general, then, we shall use the term as the name of a kind of image and also as synonymous with the fact of retention of images or ideas. In the former sense it is the name of a definite kind of complex mental process ; in the latter it is the name of a physical or psychophysical fact. For what is retained is doubt- [185] 186 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY less some modification of the nervous system, which is the basis of the brain process underlying the mem- ory image. Experimental studies. — Experimental studies of memory have been in progress for twenty-five years, and the main facts are fairly well determined and our knowledge of the various aspects and conditions of memory is tolerably accurate and complete. The divergent conclusions reached in certain fields are due, in the main, to differences in methods and con- ditions of experimentation. The main problem of experimental work has been the determination of the relation of memory to age, sex, intelligence, form and manner of presenting the material, ideational type, rapidity of learning, kind of material, and num- ber of repetitions. Other problems have been the question of improvement of the memory, the condi- tions of good memory, the most economical methods of learning, and the function of the teacher in the process of memorising. We shall proceed to set forth the results of the experimental work in the various fields and indicate the significance of these results for education. Relation of memory to age and sex. — It is the pop- ular opinion that the memory of childhood is supe- rior to that of any later period of life, but this seems not to be the case, for memory improves up to ado- lescence and possibly to maturity. The immediate memory span for digits improves from five in the early school years to seven in the later school years. Nor does memory decline later. The memory of adults remains as good as at any earlier period of life, at least till general mental decline sets in, al- MEMORY 187 though there are no experimental studies of the memory of old age. This improvement with age, however, turns out to be more a matter of immediate memory than of permanent retention. Some studies show that the child retains about as much relatively of what he learns as does the adult, but he can not grasp as much, can not learn as much, and this may be due to the fact that experience, increased knowl- edge, enhances the ability to learn. There is some evidence that memory, or at least some aspects of memory, reaches its greatest efficiency at about the beginning of adolescence. It seems, for example, that poetry can be committed to memory by pupils of this age better than at any other time. This may be connected with the fact of universal interest in poetry at this age, which prompts so many boys and girls to write poetry at this time. Most experimental studies of memory that have taken account of differences due to sex have found that the memory of girls was better than that of boys, although it is somewhat dependent upon the nature of the material memorised, boys sometimes excelling in rote memory for names of concrete things and for real objects. Girls also excel in logical memory. In tests of public school children conducted by the au- thor it was found that the girls excelled in logical memory at every age from nine to fifteen with the single exception of the age eleven, when the boys and girls made practically the same record. That the memory of girls should be rather uniformly better than that of boys is a curious and interesting fact that awaits explanation. 188 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 40 35 30 25 20 Age Memonj Curve . A^e 10 II IZ 13 14 IS 16 17 18 The Improvement of logical memory with age is shown by the rise of the curves. The material used for the test was The Marble Sto g to m ■5 H Diseases of mouth and tnroat and speech defects. S m a> m •3 a !S m 01 2.1 B CQ e5 m 264 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Date of birth: Name in full. Tr. PHYSICAL RECORD. Mo .Day. Height, Cm. ti) M ♦J Xi Grip. Tapping rate. Visual acuity. Auditory acuity. M a •3 a B a 53 «• Qi J « Q « J s J J TESTS AND NOEMS 265 MENTAL RECORD. Mo .Day. Date of birth : Yr Name in full Record standing by rank, disposition by a word. a C d o a a d .2 % *o O m CD a in Ot aS 5 266 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Date of birth: Name in full. SCHOOL RECORD. (Standing in Branches Studied.) Yr Mo Day. The names of the various school branches are to be filled in in ink and the pupil's standing recorded in the form of rank in class, 1 representing first in class ; 2, second in class, and so on ; deport- ment as excellent, good, medium, bad, very bad. p 11 TESTS AND NORMS 267 NoBMS OF Standing and Sitting Height, in Cm. (Smedlky). Standing Height. Sitting Heiglit. Age. Boys. Girls. Boys. Girls. 6.0 110.69 109.66 62.40 61.72 6.5 113.25 112.51 63.54 62.90 7.0 115.82 115.37 64.67 64.07 7.5 118.39 118.22 65.78 65.25 8.0 120.93 120.49 66.75 66.34 8.5 123.48 122.75 67.72 67.43 9.0 126.14 125.24 68.79 68.32 9.5 128.80 127.74 69.85 69.21 10.0 130.91 130.07 70.56 70.05 10.5 133.03 132.41 71.26 70.89 11.0 135.11 135.35 72.10 72.23 11.5 137.19 138.30 72.93 73.58 12.0 139.54 141.31 73.80 74.93 12.5 141.89 144.32 74.70 76.29 13.0 145.54 147.68 76.24 77.91 13.5 149.09 151.04 77.79 79.54 14.0 151.92 153.64 79.21 80.99 14.5 154.74 156.24 80.64 82.43 15.0 158.07 156.83 82.18 83.21 15.5 161.41 157.42 83.68 83.99 16.0 164.03 158.30 85.43 84.54 16.5 166.65 159.18 87.17 85.09 17.0 167.85 159.26 88.16 85.20 17.5 169.04 159.34 89.14 85.30 18.0 171.23 159.42 90.30 85.51 18.5 173.41 159.50 91.46 85.72 NoBMS OF Weight, in Kg., with Clothing (Smedley). Age. Boys. Girls. Age. Boys. Girls. 6 19.738 18.870 13 38.084 38.974 7 21.613 20.974 14 42.696 44.219 8 23.817 23.010 15 47.993 48.161 9 26.336 25.257 16 53.238 50.652 10 28.707 27.795 17 57.384 52.386 11 31.223 30.662 18 61.283 52.923 12 34.151 34.373 268 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY NoBMS OF Lung (Vital) Capacity (Smkdlet). Age. Boys. Girls. Age. Boys. Girls. 6 1023 950 13 2108 1827 7 1168 1061 14 .... 2395 2014 8 1316 1165 15 2697 2168 9 1469 1286 16 .... 3120 2266 10 1603 1409 17 3483 2319 11 1732 1526 18 3655 2343 12 1883 1064 Norms of Strength of Geip, in Kg. (Smedley). , Boys. , , Girls. , Age. Rt. baud. L. band. Rt. hand. L. hand. 6 9.21 8.48 8.36 7.74 7 10.74 10.11 9.88 9.24 8 12.41 11.67 11.16 10.48 9 14.34 13.47 12.77 11.97 10 16.52 15.59 14.65 13.72 11 18.85 17.72 16.54 15.52 12 21.24 19.71 18.92 17.78 13 24.44 22.51 21.84 20.39 14 28.42 26.22 24.79 22.92 15 33.39 30.88 27.00 24.92 16 39.37 36.39 28.70 26.56 17 44.74 40.96 29.56 27.43 18 49.28 45.01 29.75 27.68 Norms of Tapping Rate (Smedley). No. , Boys. > No. , Girls. > Age. tested. Rt. hand. L. hand. tested. Rt. hand. L. hand. 8 31 147 117 31 146 117 9 60 151 127 44 149 118 10 47 161 132 48 157 129 11 49 109 141 48 169 139 12 44 170 145 50 169 140 13 50 184 156 45 178 153 14 40 184 155 67 181 157 15 37 191 169 48 181 159 16 21 196 170 50 188 167 17 13 196 174 40 184 162 18 3 197 183 24 193 169 The records in the above table represents the number of taps In 30 seconds. The number tested, however, is so small that the table is not very reliable. APPENDIX. The Development of the Instincts. If we could make out a table showing the orderly appearance of the instincts and the periods of their dominance, we could then arrange the curriculum of the schools to correspond to the in- stinctive activities. But the matter is not simple. The time of first appearance of the various instincts varies much according to the reported observations, and their periods of dominance vary still more. The appearance of an instinctive action, even after the structures are ready for it, depends upon the appearance of the situation that normally calls forth the particular form of response. There is a variation of a year or two in the maturing of the struc- tures that underlie the instincts. And even after the first appear- ance of an instinct the future course is entirely dependent upon experience. An instinctive tendency may be early subdued, or it may be strengthened and perpetuated. The nearest we can come to a solution of the problem is to determine by statistical studies the time when, on the average, an instinctive tendency is at its height, and in some cases this may be sufficiently definite to be of value to education. But only in a broad way can the instincts determine the order of the curriculum. The individual, adaptive and environmental instinctive tendencies are all operative when the child enters school, and can be depended upon to furnish motive and initiative. The social tendencies are also operative and grow in strength steadily till maturity. The fact is that other factors are more important in determining the arrangement of the curricu- lum. As far as his instincts are concerned, we may teach a six year old boy about stars, bugs, flowers, weeds, stones, rivers and mountains, and wise teaching doubtless teaches something about all these things from the beginning. Since the appearance is vari- able, and since the strength of instinctive tendencies is dependent upon experience, and therefore varies immensely for different indi- viduals, the teacher will have to ascertain for each individual case what instinctive tendencies will function best to furnish initiative and motive. At any rate, the instincts will have to be taken into the laboratory and worked out with a great deal more care than has ever been used in their study before we can do anything more than indicated. However, it may be worth while to give in brief form the results of various studies of instincts and the emotive instinctive responses : Imitation. — First appearance, 59th day (reflex), 171st day (vol- untary). Dearborn; in 2nd half of first year, Kirkpatrick ; 6th or 7th month, Baldwin; 15th week, Preyer; 237th day, Major; 4th month. Sully. Most prominent 4th to 7th year, Kirkpatrick. Play. — In the second quarter of first year, Kirkpatrick, Major, Shinn; 341st day. Dearborn. Normally, always operative later. Migrating. — 1st to 3rd or 4th year, Kline ; 2nd or 3rd year, Kirk- [269] 270 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Patrick ; must be subdued by early adolescence or may become per- manent tendency. Collecting. — Not later than the 3rd year, Burk ; in the 2nd year, Kirkpatrick. At its height at 10, Burk. Construction. — Appears, 9th month. Sully ; 13th month, Tiede- mann ; 14th month, Major. Interest in construction is prominent throughout school life, normally. Rivalry. — According to Kirkpatrick, appears in the 4th or 5th year. It may be relied upon to function throughout child-life. Sympathy. — 7th and 8th month, Tracy ; 12th month. Sully ; 22nd month, Baldwin ; 27th month, Major ; 3rd year, Kirkpatrick. Later responses are largely due to experience and training. Pride. — 19th month, Preyer. Fear. — First appears, 2nd month, Tracy and Shinn ; 3rd month, Major ; 4th month, Dearborn and Preyer ; 7th month. Sully ; 1st year, Kirkpatrick. Fear is greatest in 3rd and 4th years, accord- ing to Kirkpatrick. Anger. — In young babies, Kirkpatrick ; 10th month, Darwin and Preyer ; 2nd month, Perez. Curiosity. — 22d week, Preyer. Under proper conditions, curiosity functions throughout school life. It will be seen from the above that all the important instinctive tendencies, except the socialistic, function normally throughout the school life of the child. The strength of these tendencies depends upon the demands made upon them in the experience of the child. The older and more fundamental to the life of man the tendency, the more independent it is of experience. INDEX INDEX Achilles, 54. Active attention, 208. Acquired characters not In- herited, 29. Activity in education, 16. Addams, Jane, 64. Adolescent play, 101. Advisor of clubs, 65. Aeneid, 54. Aim of Education, 2. Aim of moral training, 166. Affection, pleasant in habits, 130. American Indian, Migrations of, 76. Ancient languages, 159. Anger, 55. Appleton, L. E., 97. Art, 225. Association of ideas, 221. Association, determinants of, 223. Associations and memory, 192. Atavism, 28. ATTENTION, 206. Attention, function of, 211. and fatigue, 240. less with habituation, 129. meaning of, 206. and symbols, 218. Attitude in habit, 142. Automatisms, breaking of, 157. Biological results of habitua- tion, 126. Biology, background of psy- chology, 13. Birds, migrations of, 75. Body and mind, 17. Brain, function of, 92. Bright child active, 93. Bryan, harangue vs., 54. Cancellation method. 243. ^ Capacity for work, 240. Cayuga lake, 49. Childhood and habituation, 141. Child, impregnable, 44. Children's troubles, 62. Chums, 63. Clubs, bad effects of, 64. benefits of, 64. and collecting instinct, 85. Co-efficient of learning, 202. COLLECTING INSTINCT, 83. Collecting instinct, development of, 83. use in school, 84. Collections, 84. Combined method in determin- ing fatigue, 243. Competition, 57. Completion method in determin- ing fatigue, 243. Computation method in deter- mining fatigue, 242. Committing to memory, 193. Conditions of drill, 151. Consciousness, 18. Consistency with children, 153. Continuous work method In de- termining fatigue, 244. Contrary suggestion, 118. Copying method in determining fatigue, 243. Country school, 86. " Cramming, 195. Darwin, Charles, 15, 126. Defectives, should be removed from school, 118. Determine the child's world, 10. Development, 16. Discussions, futile in morals, 165. Disease not inherited, 29. Dressing and feeding of child, 141. Drill, 149. Drills, should be short, 142. Dynamic view of world, 14. Education as adjustment, 9. Education not scientific, 2. Educational process, 5. Educational psychologist, 8. Educational psychology, 7. Emotions and morals, 178. Endurance due to habituation, 129. [273] 274 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY ENVIRONMENTAL INSTINCTS, 74. Esthesiometry, 242. Eugenics, 31. Evolution of body, 13. Evolution and education, 15. Evolution of mind, 15. Exceptions, in habit-formation, 152. Excess energy theory of play, 96. Experience, 222. Expression, 10. Extra digits, 28. Family fireside, must be re- vived, 69. Farming, scientific, 1. V FATIGUE, 239. Fatigue, less w^lth habituation, 128, 131. nature of, 239. pedagogy of, 250. poisons, 240. symptoms of, 240. Fatiguability, types of, 246. Fear, 50. expression of, 52. objects of, 51. Fighting Instinct, 54. Fighting among boys, 56. Fighting, agreements as to, 56. Fixity in morals, 181. Forbush, 64. Fraternities, 69. Function of teacher, 146, 199. Galton's law, 27. Gang instinct. 61. Gangs and clubs, 64. Gangs, why formed. 66. General culture. 160. George Junior Republic, 70. Germ-plasm theory. 26. Girls and memory. 187. Gregariousness, 61. Gravity, center of, in education, 174. HABIT, 124. Habit, and attitude, 142. and education, 131, 146. ethics of, 134. function of, 126. nature of, 124. flywheel of society, 135. Habit-formation, laws of, 136. Habit-forming, rules for, 154. Habituation and fatigue, 245. Habituation a growth, 150. HABIT AND MORAL TRAIN- ING, 164. Habits are specific, 158, 159. Habituation, principles of, 153. Hall, G. S., 50, 57, 96, 247. HEREDITY, 24. Heredity, force of, 31. laws of, 27. limitation of, 29. meaning of, 24. mechanism of, 25. Heritage, our, 167. Honor and fighting, 57. Home life and the street gang, 68. Ideals of action, 171. Ideals, children's, 119. Ideational types, 196. Iliad, 54. Imagination, 224. IMITATION, 108. Imitation, and adaptation. 111. in animals, 109. basis of education, 112. definition of, 108. development of. 111. function of. 111. and habit, 138. and infancy, 110. as interpretation. Ill, 115. and language, 113, 114. Impression, first, 190. Improvement, none in low pres- sure work, 250. Industrial education, 20. Infancy, 9. Inhibition, 172. INSTINCTS, 35. Instincts, in chickens, 37. classification of, 44. defined, 35. Individualistic, 48. in man, 38, and morals, 168. and reflexes, 37. specialisation of, 42. INDEX 275 Isolated fatigue, 249. James, Wm., 51, 125, 135* Johnson, G. E., 96. Latin, why studied, 161. Lawful environment means a lawful child, 169. Law, meaning of, 14. Learning curve, 136. Learning by wholes, 193. Long infancy, 30. Loss of body parts, 92. Lower animals and training, 9. Lower animals, migrations of, 74. Manipulation of environment, 169. Manual training, 20. Mastery of details, 148. Mathematical habits, 160. Meaning, 232. and education, 233. Measure of fatigue, 241. Medicine, scientific, 1. Mechanism, the body as, 18. MEMORY, 185. Memory, and age, 186. curve, 188. experiments in, 186. and intelligence, 199. material, 194. meaning of, 185. method of, in fatigue, 242. and practice, 189. and sex, 186. Mental evolution, 8, 15. Mental heredity, 28. Method, basis of, 6, 8. Mendel's law, 27. Migrations, early, 76. Migrations and school, 81. MIGRATORY INSTINCT, 74. Migrations and the home, 82. Migrations of man, 76. Mind, brain, muscle, 18. Mollycoddles, 103. Motive, 149. ,__—— Moral training, nothing new In, 178. Moral training and psychology, 165. Mosso, A., 240. Miinsterberg, H., 214, 217. Muscular activity, end of edu- cation, 20. Muscles and nerves trained, 18. Muscles and brain, 91. Museums, school, 85. Natural heredity, 30. Natural selection, 32. Nature of children, 4. Nature study, 17. Neatness, habits of, 158. Nervous system and attention, 211. Nest-building, 35. Neurology and attention, 206. Norms, mental, 260-1. physical, 267-8. Offner, M.. 239, 240. 246, 250. Origin of species, 15. Pace-setting, 245. Pangenesis, 26. Parks, 68. Parents, associates of children, 173. Parents and fear, 52. Parents and laws of habit-for- mation, 154. Passive attention, 208. Pauses in school work, 248. Periodicity of instincts, 39. Personal hygiene, 175. Phases of attention. 208, Phases of fatigue, 245. Philosophy student, 159. Physical condition and memory, 192. Physiological methods in fa- tigue, 223. Plasticity, 133, 180. PLAY, 91. 276 THE OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY Play, of adults, 104. and drill, 102. and fatigue, 248. and morals, 101. pedagogy of, 102. and work, 103. Play Instinct, development of, 98. Pleasurable repetition, 140. Possibilities of parents and teachers, 43. Practice, 149. Practice effects, 226. Primitive moral training, 170. Professional habits, 159. Procedure in habituation, 147. Promptness at school, securing, 155. Psychic life and muscular ac- tion, 92. Psychological methods in fa- tigue, 242. Psychological results of habitua- tion, 129. Reasoning, 226. training in, 228. training in, specific, 231. and education, 234. Recapitulation and heredity, 26. Records, 255, 202-6. Repetition, 136. in attention, 140. in memory, 190. in moral training, 172. Rest by change of worlj, 248. Rest from practice, 151. Retention, 190. Riis, J., 64. Rising early, 157. Roosevelt, 54. Rowe, S. H., 151, 154. Salmon, migrations of, 74. Savagery in children, 49. Schiller, theory of play, 96. School and home, 173. School management, 116. School sessions, length of, 247. Schools should not exhaust child, 251. Seals, migrations of, 74. Securing practice, 156. Sensitivity and fatigue, 240. Sensory clearness, 207. Skill due to habit, 127. Small differences, 31. Smoking, breaking habit of, 157. Social heredity, 30. Social inheritance, 115. SOCIAL INSTINCTS, 61. Social instincts and the school, 67. Spalding's studies, 37. Special fatigue, 249. Speed and habit, 137. Spencer, H., theory of play, 96. Spirit of club, 65. Spurts, 245. Static view of world, 14. Sympathy, 70. Tadpoles, migrations of, 75. Teacher and the instincts, 42. Teacher and fear, 53. TESTS AND NORMS, 254. Theater in the school, 116. Theories of play, 94. THINKING, 221. Thinking, defined. 226. Time and place for practice, 151, 156. Titchener, E. B., 195, 209. Training in attention, 213, 215. Tramps, 79. Truancies, 78. Truancies, causes of, 79. Typewriting, 139. Unit characters, 27. Unit characters of mind, 28. Usefulness of studies, 161. Utilizing gang instinct, 65. Variability of instincts, 36, Warming-up, 245. Weismann, 26. Will and muscles, 93. Winter, learn to swim in, 126. Women, education of, 174. NOV 21 1912 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 021 763 088 5