Now it is one thing to train a mind to deal effectively with its environment and to achieve some value in the modifications which it makes in that environment. It is a different thing to hold that mind is the product of the environment. A well-known psychologist says that the aim of his science is to predict and control behavior. He offers us the conditioned reflex as the means to any desired result, and says that if he could have full control of the environment of a given number of children, he would permit some one to select by lot the future life and career of each child, and he would form the mind of each according to the chosen pattern. Our modern environmentalists have more in common with mediæval scholasticism than they think. The aim of both is to produce an individual who will react under all circumstances according to a prearranged pattern. Scholasticism, as we have seen, consisted chiefly of memory drill and training in logic and disputation. Law and theology were sometimes studied, but proficiency in such subjects does not in itself mean that a man has acquired a liberal education. He may only have learned to do the conventional trick when the expected signal is given, much like a trained dog in a circus. The same must be said of much modern professional training. The scholastic spirit haunts the legal mind to this day. Also it is possible--perhaps usual--for one to study medicine, and never once get an idea of what medicine means to the scientist. Most people educated by school teachers and college professors are in fact trained in this way. Think of what passes for moral and religious training. With respect to the most important questions in life, people have been so “conditioned” that they do not try to solve problems as they arise, but to say and do the expected thing on occasion. I once heard a professor in a theological seminary instruct his class in the art of visiting the sick. The students were busy copying in their note books the speeches which it is correct for a pastor to make on such occasions. The following is typical of such instruction. “As you enter the sick-room it is well to say When God puts a man down on his back, it is so that he may look up into Heaven.” In such habit formation, learning is mere repetition. There is nothing of independence of judgment, no reflection on ends, no development of the capacity to deal with new situations. The better one is trained the more automatic one’s behavior becomes. And here we see the limitations to much so-called practical education,--“education for work and for life.”