cites the fact that, though the average time which elapses before a sense stimulus, say of light, can be recognized as such is one eighth to one fifth of a second, that if a signal is given before the coming of the sense stimulus, so that the mind can prepare itself, the time may be reduced to one thirteenth of a second.

Working by the problem is employing the psychology of attention. Working by the problem is nothing more than employing the psychology of attention. But who must have the problem? It is not enough that the teacher have it and work by it. Each student must have it also. The teacher cannot supply it to them. He can only arouse it within them—it must come out of their past experience. When the teacher states his problem the most that his words can do is to make the learner conscious of a problem already latent in his own mind. It may not be the same as the teacher's. It may, indeed, be of slight worth; but the ability to find out what it is, to postpone one's own problem, and to assist the person whose question it is to find a satisfactory answer for it, is that which makes teaching a fine art.

According to this view the preparation for the study of the lesson is more important than any other phase of study. Every prospective lesson should be resolved into its definite problems before

anything else is attempted. It is only by acquiring a conscious method of attacking our work that we may really be said to learn anything. The method is applicable to every study and to every lesson. It involves nothing more nor less than for each student to get into the way of asking himself before he attempts to do anything further, "Now just what is it that I am trying to do?"

1

"The use of the problem as the form of educating the reason," says Professor Henderson, may be said to be the largest outcome of educational reform in the direction of method." There remains much to be done to bring this new-old method into general use. Not the least of the changes it involves concern the textbooks. Most of them have a list of questions at the end of each chapter. The student comes upon them after he has diligently tried to learn the answers of the text, without having had the attention-fixing, forcegathering questions to help him. Should they not come at the beginning, rather than at the end, of the chapter?

1 Henderson, Principles of Education, p. 273. New York, 1910.

CHAPTER IX

ORGANIZATION BY SELECTION

The part that the students take in the work of the classroom diminishes progressively as they advance. Why is this? A person who goes from a kindergarten or a primary classroom to the exercises of an eighth grade, a high school, or a college class is pretty certain to note that little children take a much more active part in the work of learning than do the youths and maidens of the advanced classes. The little fellows are full of questions, which neither time nor place can keep them from asking. The older ones can hardly be prevailed upon to ask a question or to express a doubt as to the sufficiency of that which they read or of what has been told them. The disease is progressive. The most unresponsive of all grades of students are college students. To get them to speak out their minds freely upon the subject under discussion is nearly impossible. They prefer to sit clamlike and noncommittal, to receive and not to give. Yet every one of them, when he first came to school, was as eagerly expressive as the children of the kindergarten now are. Something has happened to them

as they journeyed from the first grade to the last which has made them spectators and not participants in the game of knowledge. Neither mental habits nor life interests can be successfully cultivated in this passive way. If it is what one does that teaches him, not what one hears, one question raised by a student is more effective than a dozen unasked ones answered by the teacher or the textbook.

Make your schools talking schools. There is no way to make the problem a common possession save by making the school a talking school. As soon as one can be brought to say something upon the subject under discussion, he has committed himself to think about it further. He has defined his own views and become responsible for them to his group. Now he must either support them or renounce them. We may be quite sure that the exercise which he performs just because it is set, without seeing any meaning in it or looking ahead to solve any problem of his own through it, is just "busy work" to him, no matter how old he may be. Merely to be engaged upon a subject matter which, when properly handled, has value is no guaranty that its value is being gotten. Unless the student is searching, we may be sure he is not finding, and what he does when he is not searching, but should be, is deintellectualizing to him. So important, then, is the problem as a means of teaching that it

is not easy to make it too prominent. In short it is the problem, and not the answer, for which the teacher is chiefly responsible. Somewhere in his

Autobiography" Herbert Spencer recognizes this by making the sage remark that a good teacher will constantly be raising questions which he will not attempt to answer, but will leave his students to puzzle out entirely for themselves. Such questions as, Does dew fall or rise? What is the difference between walking and running? How does the sap pass from the roots to the branches of a tree? Wherein was Abraham Lincoln a great man? What is the spirit of our country? What did St. Paul mean when he said "I am a Roman citizen "? Is it true that the most tragic utterance in Shakespeare is "Othello's occupation's gone"? Why did Socrates insist that he knew nothing?

But the use of the conversation method in teaching has other very great advantages in addition to allowing learning to proceed as problem getting. It permits the student to comprehend the meaning of his own activity from the first and to employ intelligently the methods of discovery and classification. Where it is thoroughgoingly followed, it banishes didacticism altogether.

Education as the learning of definitions. The doctrine of real predicates. Nothing is more astonishing, when we look at it critically, than the curious