training from a year's study of the laws and institutions of the Romans
greater than that from equal study of their language. The grammatical
studies which have been considered the chief depositories of
disciplinary magic would be found in general inferior to scientific
treatments of human nature as a whole. The superiority for discipline of
pure overapplied science would be referred in large measure to the fact
that pure science could be so widely applied. The disciplinary value of
geometry would appear to be due, not to the simplicity of its
conditions, but to the rigor of its proofs; the greatest disciplinary
value of Latin would appear in the case, not of those who disliked it
and found it hard, but of those to whom it was a charming game."
QUESTIONS
1. It has been experimentally determined that the ease with which one
memorizes one set of facts may be very greatly improved without a
corresponding improvement in ability to memorize in some other field.
How would you use this fact to refute the argument that we possess a
general faculty of memory?
2. How is it possible for a man to reason accurately in the field of
engineering and yet make very grave mistakes in his reasoning about
government or education?
3. What assurance have we that skill or capacity for successful work
developed in one situation will be transferred to another situation
involving the same mental processes of habit formation, reasoning,
imagination, and the like?
4. What are the different types of identity which make possible transfer
of training?
5. How can we make the identity of methods of work most significant for
transfer of training and for the education of the individual?
6. Why do ideals which seem to control in one situation fail to affect
other activities in which the same ideal is called for?
7. Under what conditions may a very slight amount of transfer of
training become of the very greatest importance for education?
8. Why may we not hope for the largest results in training by compelling
children to study that which is distasteful? Do children (or adults)
work hardest when they are forced to attend to that from which they
derive little or no satisfaction?
9. Which student gets the most significant training from his algebra,
the boy who enjoys work in this field or the boy who worries through it
because algebra is required for graduation from the high school?
10. Why may we hope to secure more significant training in junior high
schools which offer a great variety of courses than was accomplished by
the seventh and eighth grades in which all pupils were compelled to
study the same subjects?
11. Why is Latin a good subject from the standpoint of training for one
student and a very poor subject with which to seek to educate another
student?
* * * * *
XIII. TYPES OF CLASSROOM EXERCISES
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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