76 EDUCATIONAL THEORY 



real for every person educated. Because the art of education is 

 making in plain honesty this attempt to find the real pupil and to 

 address the appeal of education to his real possibilities and make 

 it serve his real needs, it must have, in common with those other 

 arts with which it is allied, with the arts of government, of guid- 

 ance, of persuasion, the help of science, and the help, particularly, 

 of psychology. 



We pass now to a consideration of certain psychological aspects 

 of the questions that have already been reviewed. 



IV. The Third Group: Psychological Problems 



The psychological problems most obviously involved in the 

 problems of Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit which have thus far been 

 considered, are those entering into the problem of psychological or 

 educational diagnosis, which stands in intimate connection with 

 certain forms of physiological diagnosis. By such diagnosis is meant 

 a determination of the normal and typical human characteristics and 

 characters with which education has to do, the ranges of normal 

 variation among them, and the demarkation of their pathological 

 accompaniments. A little more definitely, this may be considered 

 under the three divisions of: 



(1) The determination of the successive stages of normal human 

 development, with especial reference to the ripening of instincts and 

 to manifestations of accelerated and arrested development; 



(2) The relation of the generic to the specific in mental develop- 

 ment, with especial reference to possibilities of general or " formal " 

 culture; and 



(3) The relation of motor tendencies to general culture and to 

 the processes of development, particularly under the forms of imi- 

 tation and suggestion. 



In discussions of prescription and election, frequent reference is 

 made to the cultural or disciplinary value of studies. It is held that 

 the intellectual and moral gain from any single bit of instruction 

 spreads, as it were, over a considerable area of the mental life over 

 the whole of that life in all of its aspects, it may be; or over all mani- 

 festations of one or more " faculties," as it is more commonly stated. 

 This assumption, if not wholly incorrect, is* very greatly overdrawn, 

 yet it has persisted in educational discussions long after psychologists 

 have abandoned the doctrine on which it is seen to rest. Recent 

 psychology has shown that mental traits and activities which are 

 so related that they may conveniently be grouped under a single 

 designation are not commonly found to be so related that the im- 

 provement by training of one member of the group bearing the 

 common name results in equal improvement of all members of that 



