EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 



sight. In the newer terminology, learning takes place by 

 the formation of new Gestalten, or meaning complexes, 

 not by the mere addition and subtraction of bonds. It is 

 more a rational and less a mechanical process than was 

 formerly supposed. 



The preceding statements will doubtless seem very vague 

 to the reader who is not acquainted with the recent liter- 

 ature of Gestalt psychology. However, the applications 

 of the newer theories to education are fairly clear. The 

 psychologist is coming to view the educative process less 

 and less as mere habit formation, and to lay greater stress 

 upon the part played by insight, attitudes, and interests. 

 The more recent textbooks on educational psychology give 

 less space to economic methods of memorizing and more 

 to explanations of how meanings develop. The effect 

 upon school work should be to reduce the emphasis upon 

 routine drill and to give larger place to activities of the kind 

 that stimulate the child to set problems for himself and to 

 seek rational methods for their solution. 



Because of limitations of space I shall omit entirely 

 from this discussion consideration of certain issues which 

 have figured so largely in texts in the psychology of learn- 

 ing: the form of the learning curve and of the curve of 

 forgetting, the relative advantages of learning by parts or 

 by wholes, and the economic distribution of practice 

 periods. These issues have their interest, but they have to 

 do chiefly with habit formation, which is the least impor- 

 tant kind of learning. 



A very controversial problem in connection with learn- 

 ing is the extent to which the effects of training are capable 

 of transfer to other functions. This is the so-called theory 

 of formal discipline. Until a half century or so ago it was 

 almost universally believed that extensive transfer takes 

 place, and that one of the main purposes of education 

 should be to train such hypothetical faculties as perception, 



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