678 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



of the mind, the ability to exercise which keenly and readily was 

 the thing most to be coveted in life, it was a natural result that 

 mathematics should have formed the backbone of school studies. 

 And since we are still in that period when reasoning is regarded 

 by most people as the highest attribute of man, we of necessity 

 must have arithmetic as the most important subject in the ele- 

 mentary school curriculum. 



It will not be possible within the limits imposed upon us here 

 to examine in detail the theories of this " faculty " psychology : it 

 will suffice to say, although perhaps in a dogmatic manner, that 

 in our own day students of the mind are breaking away from 

 these old notions, and establishing what seems to be a much. more 

 rational and simple system of psychology; and following upon 

 this there must come a different appraisal of educational materi- 

 als, and a consequent change in the subjects taught in our schools. 

 To be very brief, one important general conception of modern 

 educational psychology is that the mind is a unit, and develops as 

 a unity. As an inference from this it can be seen that the material 

 of instruction in the school must be chosen with a view to train 

 the whole individual his perceiving, remembering, imagining, 

 judging, and reasoning faculties, so called, and not any one of 

 them singled out from all the others. And not only must this 

 material train one intellectually as a unity, but it must affect him 

 emotionally and volitionally as well that is, it must develop 

 character. We have had in the past, as every one knows, a kind 

 of educational philosophy which declared that there should be 

 one subject to train one faculty, another subject another faculty, 

 and so on throughout the list of faculties and subjects ; and there 

 should also and particularly be special material to cultivate the 

 emotions and furnish proper incentives to the will. The error of 

 this sort of thing must be plainly apparent to any one who will 

 study the problem concretely, by observing and interpreting the 

 activities of his own mind, and looking into the various types of 

 mind in his environment. If one will become introspective for a 

 little time he will see that his perceptions are not divorced from 

 his memory and reason along the lines that he is perceiving ; and 

 he will also discover that what he perceives, remembers, or re- 

 flects upon has its effect upon his emotions and will in leading 

 him to some sort of action, immediate or in the future. One 

 never sees a physician who is keen and ready in his perceptions 

 of things relating to the practice of medicine who can not and 

 does not remember, reason, and imagine equally well in regard to 

 those matters ; nor is his character, his personality free from the 

 shaping influences of his system of thought. The same may, of 

 course, be said of the lawyer, the merchant, or any other type of 

 individual. The truthful view of the case seems to be that per- 



