3. Is the "training of the imagination" any more possible in languages than it is in mathematics or science? Would not project-teaching, with emphasis on the discovery and statement and solution of new problems, stir the imagination in any subject? Can any well-rounded curriculum omit any of the subjects which deal with the major interests of life or reveal important aspects of experience?

4. If we were to limit college-entrance requirements in language to a single language and insist on mastery of that, including ability to read and write it fluently, to understand it when spoken, and to pronounce it correctly, also a fair knowledge of its literature and the history of the people whose language it is, should we gain or lose educationally?

5. Does the author think of this problem in terms of the needs of the whole school population of the country? Is there any important sense in which mental discipline is a social problem rather than simply a problem of individual learning? Ought we, in seeking to discipline the mind, to run the risk of turning the attention of large numbers of children away from facts and questions of general social importance?

THE MIND AS MISREPRESENTED TO

TEACHERS

GEORGE M. STRATTON

I

It is well that education should be eyed with suspicion, as it has been from of old. "Be not many of you teachers," says an ancient letter, "knowing that ye shall receive heavier judgment." And to-day we should have an open ear for the latest messenger who runs in breathless to tell us of teachers' evil ways. Yet occasionally we may hold and cross-question the tidings-bearer, lest from a false report we should act hastily, only to make bad worse.

Such caution is perhaps needed with those who now come in the name of psychology, saying that, since mental discipline, which clings to a few central studies to develop the mind, has no scientific standing whatever, the school should, with whole heart, work to a different end, teaching only those studies that inform, that give useful knowledge. We may find that the one side no less than the other speaks unreliably for the vital young science whose name is so freely taken. But first let us hale the witnesses into court. The child's mind, according to one account, is a group of wide powers or faculties, of observation, for example, and memory, attention, imagination, reason, — which the teacher, by suited exercises, must make strong and supple. These great powers, once they become vigorous and elastic, stand ready throughout life for all important needs. Time is well given to their development, even by studies that in themselves will never be of use. The particulars needed

for one's work are too many to be foreseen, and, with a prepared mind, may easily be learned when the need is clearer. Powers have been given new life, not only for buying and selling and medicine and law, but for still wider service in regions where the day's work will never lead.

Those who so believe, their opponents say, are suckled in a creed outworn. Science has destroyed the simple faith. Experiments by James, Thorndike, Woodworth, and others have shown how idle is the attempt to train these general powers; have shown, indeed, that there are no general powers to train. The belief in such powers goes with the antiquated idea of mental faculties, now of historic interest only, and swept aside with phrenology and its absurd map of the skull and brain.

Having destroyed in this way the faith in general powers and their training, what is offered in its place? A belief in particulars, and in particulars only. Instead of a single power of memory, there is a power to recall colors, another power to recall sounds, and so on - we know not how far. The mind is our convenient name for countless special operations or functions. We may train one of these functions or a number of them, but not a function in general attention in general, or imagination in general, or reason. Further, these countless particular functions are independent; and when you have trained one of them, you have trained that limited function and none else. What you do to the mind by way of education knows its place; it never spreads. You train what you train.

The educational corollary of these things is momentous. We must discover the specific reaction, the specific information, which the child will use in after life, and make sure that he possesses these and only these. The teacher's direction of attention here veers from east to west. The centre of interest is no longer the child's mind, but the

particular things in life that have to be done. Of a study, we are to ask, "Does it contribute to the doing of these things?" rather than, "Does the study make the child's mind more alert or sound or sane?" Instead of giving form to the mind, we are to give it information. Instead of moulding the mind, we are to fill the mind. Where the education whose aim was mental discipline might have as its symbol a stripped athlete busied with Indian clubs and chest-weights for strength and agility, the education that opposes mental discipline and calls for mental contents might have as its symbol some receptacle that is being filled — a jar, with oil or wine; or a tool-chest, with screw-driver, chisel, and plane.

The controversy is thus in brief before us, each side with its different description of the mind. "Believe the psychologist," is the cry of a recent writer to schoolmen; and this must be my excuse for offering objection to both accounts, and in their place a picture of the mind different from either, and, I believe, with a far richer promise of education.

II

The mind is surely ill described by most believers in mental discipline. In so far as our remembering is explained by a faculty of memory, and our reasoning by a faculty of reason, we are offered mere words in the place of causes. But, along with explanations that do not explain, are clear errors. The mind is divided into great powers, like sight, hearing, memory, imagination, reason, each of which is supposed to be almost simple and uniform throughout. And this we now know is false.

Moreover, the believers in mental discipline too often fix their interest upon the powers by which we know our intellectual faculties, and treat like a stepmother those great powers by which we take delight, and are moved to

passion, and make resolve, and act. A certain strength and deftness of bare intellect is overvalued, to the misprising of the deep inner forces that drive and direct the intellect, as well as of something more nearly external - the definite and detailed knowledge of the objects with which intelligence must deal.

The defects of this account of mind are thus greater than many even of its critics seem to know. But some of the defects are caught and well denounced by those who hold the mind but as a receptacle to be given "contents." They rightly see the mind helpless, even were it deft and strong; they see its lack of actual knowledge. They see also that the mind is of immeasurably more varied powers than are nominated in the short list of faculties in which the old schoolmaster was taught to believe.

But with these rugged virtues, why not take the whole doctrine of "contents" to our hearts?

First, and perhaps least important, its watchword confirms the ignorant in their ignorance. We are only too ready to regard the child's mind as a vessel into which knowledge is to be poured, and the new doctrine should appear to give to this crude notion a kind of scientific seal. So far as the child's training is viewed as mental contents, the mind itself is viewed as a receptacle, a container. And a container is both inert and indifferent: a jug idly accepts anything; a tool-chest takes no active part to receive its tools. Merely glance at the metaphor, and its absurdity is revealed. Those who believe in mental contents would cry out with one voice that they did not mean that.

For, if there is anything upon which psychologists are agreed, it is that the mind is active; not indifferent, but selective, forever choosing and rejecting. Even its humblest experiences, the colors and sounds by which the world is known, are not given us, but are the mind's unique and mysterious response to external stimulation.