690 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXXI. No. 801 



street and society in general. A great deal 

 of modern educational literature turns 

 upon tlie fallacy of this division of labor. 

 The earlier vogue of manual training and 

 the domestic arts before the frank recog- 

 nition of their relation to industrial train- 

 ing took place, was due in no small part to 

 the attempt to introduce those interests of 

 the child's into the field of his instruction 

 which gathers about a socially constituted 

 self, to admit the child's personality as a 

 whole into the school. 



I think we should be pi'epared to admit 

 the implication of this educational move- 

 ment — that however abstract the material 

 is which is presented and however ab- 

 stracted its ultimate use is from the im- 

 mediate activities of the child, the situa- 

 tion implied in instruction and in the 

 psychology of that instruction is a social 

 situation; that it is impossible to fully 

 interpret or control the process of instruc- 

 tion without recognizing the child as a 

 self and viewing his conscious processes 

 from the point of view of their relation in 

 his consciousness to his self, among other 

 selves. 



In the first place, back of all instruction 

 lies the relation of the child to the teacher 

 and about it lie the relations of the child 

 to the other children in the school-room 

 and on the play-ground. It is, how- 

 ever, of interest to note that so far as the 

 material of instruction is concerned an 

 ideal situation has been conceived to be 

 one in which the personality of the 

 teacher disappears as completely as pos- 

 sible behind the process of learning. In 

 the actual process of instruction the em- 

 phasis upon the relation of pupil and 

 teacher in the consciousness of the child 

 has been felt to be unfortunate. In like 

 manner the instinctive social relations be- 

 tween the children in school hours is re- 

 pressed. In the process of memorizing 



and reciting a lesson, or working out a 

 problem in arithmetic a vivid conscious- 

 ness of the personality of the teacher in his 

 relationship to that of the child would im- 

 ply either that the teacher was obliged to 

 exercise discipline to carry on the process 

 of instruction, and this must in the nature 

 of the case constitute friction and division 

 of attention, or else that the child's inter- 

 est is distracted from the subject matter 

 of the lesson, to something in which the 

 personality of the teacher and pupil might 

 find some other content; for even a teach- 

 er's approval and a child's delight therein 

 has no essential relation to the mere sub- 

 ject matter of arithmetic or English. It 

 certainly has no such relationship as that 

 implied in apprenticeship, in the boy's 

 helping on the farm or the girl's helping 

 in the housekeeping, has no such relation- 

 ship as that of members of an athletic 

 team to each other. In these latter in- 

 stances the vivid consciousness of the self 

 of the child and of his master, of the 

 parents whom he helps and of the associ- 

 ates with whom he plays is part of the 

 child's consciousness of what he is doing, 

 and his consciousness of these personal 

 relationships involves no division of atten- 

 tion. Now it had been a part of the fallacy 

 of an intelleetualistic -pedagogy that a 

 divided attention was necessary to insure 

 application of attention— that the rewards, 

 and especially the punishments, of the 

 school hung before the child's mind to 

 catch the attention that was wandering 

 from the task, and through their associa- 

 tions with the sehoolwork to bring it back 

 to the task. This involves a continual vi- 

 bration of attention on the part of the 

 average child between the task and the 

 sanctions of school discipline. It is only 

 the psychology of school discipline that is 

 social. The pains and penalties, the pleas- 

 ures of success in competition, of favorable 



