PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION J. 709 



must not be taken to signify an understanding of the experience sym- 

 bolised. Deduction has its place in education ; but it should arise 

 only from the results built on inductions made at first hand by the 

 pupil. 



Must everything to be learned be learned through first-hand 

 experience ? Yes, unless it merely duplicates experience already 

 gained. 



The nervous system is merely an apparatus to secure adaptation, 

 and schooling is an artificial arrangement of experience so ordered as 

 to produce in the individual in a few years a development which has 

 taken the race ages to reach. 



Educative capacity has been produced by human environment, 

 hence the possibility of education. The potentiality in the child is 

 insistent for development. The teacher provides the necessary stimuli. 



Impulse is always the starting-point. The results of impulsive 

 action are sometimes unsatisfactory. The child because of this dis- 

 satisfaction begins to control impulse. When the self of impulse fails 

 to satisfy, then the ideal self begins to emerge. The creation of the 

 ideal as a motive is a high function of the school. But the ideal as a 

 motive is not got by formal instruction in morals. ^Esthetic presen- 

 tion is the teacher's great duty in morals. When the child is shown 

 a brightly colored picture he feels, '" How beautiful." In song, 

 myth, and story the teacher presents concrete ideals of conduct in 

 suchwise that the child feels " How grand, how noble ! " Ideals are 

 more akin to aesthetics than to logic. 



Since human environment is continually changing we must have 

 a progressive curriculum. Compulsory Latin, e.g., is an anachronism. 



The child's impulsive tendencies must be judged not by their 

 actuality but by the direction of their outcome. In avoiding the 

 Scylla of considering that whatever is is right in the child one must 

 not fall into the Charybdis of supposing that childhood is an evil to be 

 escaped from. 



The school studies must demonstrate their worth to the child 

 himself at all times. The school should be so organised that there 

 arise obstacles in the child's path which he feels he must overcome, 

 because they are preventing the functioning of his experience. Each 

 obstacle provides a problem for solution. How different the child's 

 attitude to these real problems from his attitude to the artificial ones 

 of the textbook of arithmetic. To teach a child to solve problems to 

 obtain results which are absolutely worthless, both to himself and 

 others, is to manufacture stupidity in the school. Motive should 

 always be intrinsic. It should grow out of the material itself in relation 

 to the needs of the mind of the learner. The school environment 

 should appeal to the pupil's native and acquired interests, and at the 

 same time present obstacles, either intellectual or practical, to the 

 functioning of the self in the desired direction. The problems should 

 have their source in the school studies, not in the teachers. 



