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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: nature has provided adaptive instincts that will, in a certain measure, automatically educate the child, —, that is, lead him to acquire the experiences that are essential to life in civilized society, — it should not be forgotten that this automatic education has very decided limitations and that an educational system depending upon these entirely is not likely to carry the individual very far. Curiosity, play, imitation, and the spontaneous repetitive impulse may very well serve, one may say, as the starting point of an educative process that very soon carries the individual beyond these unreasoned impulses into the realm of purposeful action. While the instincts form the basis of education, they are, after all, only the basis. Curiously enough, the repetitive impulse has not been recognized in educational practice as a sanction for a certain type drill that is essential to the acquisition of skill in a number of fundamental adjustments. It is sometimes said that a child should never be subjected to drill processes for which he can see no reason. A familiar precept, based upon this principle, is the warning against requiring pupils to mechanize rules and formulae that they do not understand. While this precept is, in general, a safe guide to educational practice, it may easily be carried too far, and an extreme generalization of its implications is obviously quite contradicted by nature's own method of insuring the formation of necessary habits. On the other hand, a sole dependence upon the repetitive impulse to form the necessary habits would be quite futile. So far as natural selection has fixed this impulse, it seems to be narrowly limited to the more obvious adjustments absolutely essential to social life. Thus, through instinctive repetition, the child masters the ...
