EDUCATION IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. 683 



tary school should be concerned very little if at all with the real 

 or content subjects, because these could not be studied with profit 

 until a considerable body of symbols had been acquired, by the 

 ready use of which a pupil would be enabled to talk, read, write, 

 spell, draw, and cipher in the expression of what he gained from 

 his investigations ; and, moreover, is it not impossible for one to 

 study history, literature, or science until he has mastered a vocab- 

 ulary that will enable him to intelligently comprehend what he is 

 trying to study about ? That is to say, must he not first study 

 words so that through them as symbols he may finally get to know 

 about the realities symbolized ? It is doubtless familiar to every 

 one who has looked into the matter that there has been a revers- 

 ing of this doctrine in many places of late years, and the aim is 

 now to acquire familiarity with symbols through the things which 

 they represent. It has become a truism of modern educational 

 psychology that a symbol is learned with great difficulty and with 

 little serviceableness unless it be connected with the thing or 

 thought it is to symbolize ; it is learned only after great effort, 

 because, in the first place, it possesses no characteristic in itself 

 but that of form, and in the case of words and figures very 

 simple forms at that, which increases the difficulty of mastery. 

 A mature person looking at the end of a pencil in the endeavor 

 to fix it in the mind so that it may be identified in the future 

 from similar pencils, would find the task well-nigh impossible, 

 although it appears so entirely simple; but if the same effort 

 be made in remembering a horse, or large and complex object 

 of any kind, the problem is very much easier, because there are 

 more evident characteristics to fix the thing in the mind, and by 

 which it may be identified when it appears there again. Now, in 

 the case of learning the symbolic subjects in the schoolroom, the 

 ease of mastery depends upon every word and figure learned being 

 connected with the thought or thing it symbolizes ; the thought 

 being previously aroused in the mind, and the symbol fused with 

 it, as it were. Hence the maxim now frequently heard : First the 

 thought, then the symbol. Psychological observation has shown 

 also that the use of a symbol can become automatic in acquiring 

 or expressing thought (which is the sole ultimate object in the 

 teaching of the form subjects) only when that symbol has been 

 connected a great many times in one act of thought with the 

 thing it represents; and then whenev^er the symbol appears in 

 the mind the thing symbolized will be automatically suggested. 

 It is illustrated every day of our lives that when two or more 

 things are perceived or experienced as connected with each other 

 in time or space, one being thought of or experienced again, the 

 other invariably accompanies it in the manner of the original 

 appearance. Psychology has long recognized that contiguity is 



