It is said that all learning takes place after this fashion. An animal, a cat, may be placed in a cage, the door being so arranged that escape is possible only when the cat strikes a certain latch. After a period during which the cat makes all sorts of frantic random movements, the successful movement finally occurs and the cat escapes. The experiment is repeated and perhaps the period of futile activity will not be so long as at first. After a number of trials the cat will give up the random movements and at once unlock the door. The gradual shortening of the interval of time required for the desired response may be plotted. It is then called the animal’s “learning curve.” Such curves may also be made of human learning processes. It is said that there is no essential difference between this animal learning and our own learning whether it be to swim or play tennis, or to memorize a poem, or solve a problem in algebra, or to master the technique of a profession. One’s education thus consists wholly of one’s organized systems of responses, or habit patterns. We speak of education as the development of personality. But from this point of view personality is nothing but the sum total of an individual’s conditioned reflexes:--that is, it is merely the manner in which the organism has been taught to work. One eminent Behaviorist among the psychologists compares personality to the running of a gas engine. I will not enter upon a psychological discussion of this view of education, except to say that the method of animal training which is taken for granted is open to serious criticism. The theory proceeds on the assumption that _insight into the situation_ is not necessary to learning. The cat in the cage hits upon the successful gesture as a matter of pure chance. After a number of experiments, each said to place the animal in an identical situation, the successful action becomes “over determined,” and fixed as a habit. It is doubtful whether such training is learning at all. The animal--and conceivably the human being--need never take in the situation. The successful art, the more this learning process is perfected, degenerates into a mere gesture, related to the event in a purely external and arbitrary manner. It is difficult to see how educational methods guided by such a theory could do much to train the student in habits of independent judgment.