THE NEW ATTITUDE TOWARD DRILL[17]

Wandering about in a circle through a thick forest is perhaps an

overdrawn analogy to our activity in attempting to construct educational

theories; and yet there is a resemblance. We push out hopefully--and

often boastfully--into the unknown wilderness, absolutely certain that

we are pioneering a trail that will later become the royal highway to

learning. We struggle on, ruthlessly using the hatchet and the ax to

clear the road before us. And all too often we come back to our starting

point, having unwittingly described a perfect circle, instead of the

straight line that we had anticipated.

But I am not a pessimist, and I like to believe that, although our

course frequently resembles a circle, it is much better to characterize

it as a spiral, and that, although we do get back to a point that we

recognize, it is not, after all, our old starting point; it is an

homologous point on a higher plane. We have at least climbed a little,

even if we have not traveled in a straight line.

Now in a figurative way this explains how we have come to take our

present attitude toward the problem of drill or training in the process

of education. Drill means the repetition of a process until it has

become mechanical or automatic. It means the kind of discipline that the

recruit undergoes in the army,--the making of a series of complicated

movements so thoroughly automatic that they will be gone through with

accurately and precisely, at the word of command. It means the sort of

discipline that makes certain activities machine-like in their

operation,--so that we do not have to think about which one comes next.

Thus the mind is relieved of the burden of looking after the innumerable

details and may use its precious energy for a more important purpose.

In every adult life, a large number of these mechanized responses are

absolutely essential to efficiency. Modern civilized life is so highly

organized that it demands a multitude of reactions and adjustments which

primitive life did not demand. It goes without saying that there are

innumerable little details of our daily work that must be reduced to the

plane of unvarying habit. These details vary with the trade or

profession of the individual; hence general education cannot hope to

supply the individual with all of the automatic responses that he will

need. But, in addition to these specialized responses, there is a large

mass of responses that are common to every member of the social group.

We must all be able to communicate with one another, both through the

medium of speech, and through the medium of written and printed symbols.

We live in a society that is founded upon the principle of the division

of labor. We must exchange the products of our labor for the necessities

of life that we do not ourselves produce, and hence arises the necessity

for the short cuts to counting and measurement which we call arithmetic.

And finally we must all live together in something at least approaching

harmony; hence the thousand and one little responses that mean courtesy

and good manners must be made thoroughly automatic.

Now education, from the very earliest times, has recognized the

necessity of building up these automatic responses,--of fixing these

essential habits in all individuals. This recognition has often been

short-sighted and sometimes even blind; but it has served to hold

education rather tenaciously to a process that all must admit to be

essential.

Drill or training, however, is unfortunate in one important particular.

It invariably involves repetition; and conscious, explicit repetition

tends to become monotonous. We must hold attention to the drill process,

and yet attention abhors monotony as nature abhors a vacuum.

Consequently no small part of the tedium and irksomeness of school work

has been due to its emphasis of drill. The formalism of the older

schools has been described, criticized, and lampooned in professional

literature, and even in the pages of fiction. The disastrous results

that follow from engendering in pupils a disgust for school and all that

it represents have been eloquently portrayed. Along with the tendency

toward ease and comfort in other departments of human life has gone a

parallel tendency to relieve the school of this odious burden of formal,

lifeless, repetitive work.

This "reform movement," as I shall call it, represents our first plunge

into the wilderness. We would get away from the entanglements of drill

and into the clearings of pleasurable, spontaneous activities. A new sun

of hope dawned upon the educational world.

You are all familiar with some of the more spectacular results of this

movement. You have heard of the schools that eliminated drill processes

altogether, and depended upon clear initial development to fix the facts

and formulæ and reactions that every one needs. You have heard and

perhaps seen some of the schools that were based entirely upon the

doctrine of spontaneity, governing their work by the principle that the

child should never do anything that he did not wish to do at the moment

of doing,--although the advocates of this theory generally qualified

their principle by insisting that the skillful teacher would have the

child wish to do the right thing all the time.

Let me describe to you a school of this type that I once visited. I

learned of it through a resident of the city in which it was located. He

was delivering an address before an educational gathering on the

problems of modern education. He told the audience that, in the schools

of this enlightened city, the antiquated notions that were so pernicious

had been entirely dispensed with. He said that pupils in these schools

were no longer repressed; that all regimentation, line passing, static

posture, and other barbaric practices had been abolished; that the

pupils were free to work out their own destiny, to realize themselves,

through all forms of constructive activity; that drills had been

eliminated; that corporal punishment was never even mentioned, much less

practiced; that all was harmony, and love, and freedom, and spontaneity.

I listened to this speaker with intense interest, and, as his picture

unfolded, I became more and more convinced that this city had at last

solved the problem. I took the earliest opportunity to visit its

schools. When I reached the city I went to the superintendent's office.

I asked to be directed to the best school. "Our schools are all 'best,'"

the secretary told me with an intonation that denoted commendable pride,

and which certainly made me feel extremely humble, for here even the

laws of logic and of formal grammar had been transcended. I made bold to

apologize, however, and amended my request to make it apparent that I

wished to see the largest school. I was directed to take a certain car

and, in due time, found myself at the school. I inferred that recess was

in progress when I reached the building, and that the recess was being

celebrated within doors. After some time spent in dodging about the

corridors, I at last located the principal.

I introduced myself and asked if I could visit his school after recess

was over. "We have no recesses here," he replied (I could just catch his

voice above the din of the corridors); "this is a relaxation period for

some of the classes." He led the way to the office, and I spent a few

moments in getting the "lay of the land." I asked him, first, whether he

agreed with the doctrines that the system represented, and he told me

that he believed in them implicitly. Did he follow them out consistently

in the operation of his school? Yes, he followed them out to the letter.

We then went to several classrooms, where I saw children realizing

themselves, I thought, very effectively. There were three groups at work

in each room. One recited to the teacher, another studied at the seats,

a third did construction work at the tables. I inquired about the

mechanics of this rather elaborate organization, but I was told that

mechanics had been eliminated from this school. Mechanical organization

of the classroom, it seems, crushes the child's spontaneity, represses

his self-activity, prevents the effective operation of the principle of

self-realization. How, then, did these three groups exchange places, for

I felt that the doctrine of self-realization would not permit them to

remain in the same employment during the entire session. "Oh," the

principal replied, "when they get ready to change, they change, that's

all."

I saw that a change was coming directly, so I waited to watch it. The

group had been working with what I should call a great deal of noise and

confusion. All at once this increased tenfold. Pupils jumped over seats,

ran into each other in the aisles, scurried and scampered from this

place to that, while the teacher stood in the front of the room wildly

waving her arms. The performance lasted several minutes. "There's

spontaneity for you," the principal shouted above the roar of the storm.

I acquiesced by a nod of the head,--my lungs, through lack of training,

being unequal to the emergency.

We passed to another room. The same group system was in evidence. I

noticed pupils who had been working at their seats suddenly put away

their books and papers and skip over to the construction table. I asked

concerning the nature of the construction work. "We use it," the

principal told me, "as a reward for good work in the book subjects. You

see arithmetic is dead and dry. You must give pupils an incentive to

master it. We make the privileges of the construction table the

incentive." "What do they make at this table?" I asked. "Whatever their

fancy dictates," he replied. I was a little curious, however, to know

how it all come out. I saw one child start to work on a basket, work at

it a few minutes, then take up something else, continue a little time,

go back to the basket, and finally throw both down for a third object of

self-realization. I called the principal's attention to this phenomenon.

"How do you get the beautiful results that you exhibit?" I asked. "For

those," he said, "we just keep the pupils working on one thing until it

is finished." "But," I objected, "is that consistent with the doctrine

of spontaneity?" His answer was lost in the din of a change of groups,

and I did not follow the investigation further.

Noon dismissal was due when I went into the corridor. Lines are

forbidden in that school. At the stroke of the bell, the classroom doors

burst open and bedlam was let loose. I had anticipated what was coming,

and hurriedly betook myself to an alcove. I saw more spontaneity in two

minutes than I had ever seen before in my life. Some boys tore through

the corridors at breakneck speed and down the stairways, three steps at

a time. Others sauntered along, realizing various propensities by

pushing and shoving each other, snatching caps out of others' hands,

slapping each other over the head with books, and various other

expressions of exuberant spirits. One group stopped in front of my

alcove, and showed commendable curiosity about the visitor in their

midst. After exhausting his static possibilities, they tempted him to

dynamic reaction by making faces; but this proving to be of no avail,

they went on their way,--in the hope, doubtless, of realizing themselves

elsewhere.

I left that school with a fairly firm conviction that I had seen the

most advanced notions of educational theory worked out to a logical

conclusion. There was nothing halfway about it. There was no apology

offered for anything that happened. It was all fair and square and open

and aboveboard. To be sure, the pupils were, to my prejudiced mind, in a

condition approaching anarchy, but I could not deny the spontaneity, nor

could I deny self-activity, nor could I deny self-realization. These

principles were evidently operating without let or hindrance.

Before leaving the school, I took occasion to inquire concerning the

effect of such a system upon the teachers. I led up to it by asking the

principal if there were any nervous or anæmic children in his school.

"Not one," he replied enthusiastically; "our system eliminates them."

"But how about the teachers?" I ventured to remark, having in mind the

image of a distracted young woman whom I had seen attempting to reduce

forty little ruffians to some semblance of law and order through moral

suasion. If I judged conditions correctly, that woman was on the verge

of a nervous breakdown. My guide became confidential when I made this

inquiry. "To tell the truth," he whispered, "the system is mighty hard

on the women."

A few years ago I had the privilege of visiting a high school which was

operated upon this same principle. I visited in that school some classes

that were taught by men and women, whom I should number among the most

expert teachers that I have ever seen. The instruction that these men

and women were giving was as clear and lucid as one could desire. And

yet, in spite of that excellent instruction, pupils read newspapers,

prepared other lessons, or read books during the recitations, and did

all this openly and unreproved. They responded to their instructors with

shameless insolence. Young ladies of sixteen and seventeen coming from

cultured homes were permitted in this school to pull each other's hair,

pinch the arms of schoolmates who were reciting, and behave themselves

in general as if they were savages. The pupils lolled in their seats,

passed notes, kept up an undertone of conversation, arose from their

seats at the first tap of the bell, and piled in disorder out of the

classroom while the instructor was still talking. If the lessons had

been tedious, one might perhaps at least have palliated such conduct,

but the instruction was very far from tedious. It was bright, lively,

animated, beautifully clear, and admirably illustrated. It is simply the

theory of this school never to interfere with the spontaneous activity

of the pupils. And I may add that the school draws its enrollment very

largely from wealthy families who believe that their children are being

given the best that modern education has developed, that they are not

being subjected to the deadening methods of the average public school,

and above all that their manners are not being corrupted by promiscuous

mingling with the offspring of illiterate immigrants. And yet soon

afterward, I visited a high school in one of the poorest slum districts

of a large city. I saw pupils well-behaved, courteous to one another, to

their instructors, and to visitors. The instruction was much below that

given in the first school in point of quality, and yet the pupils were

getting from it, even under these conditions, vastly more than were the

pupils of the other school from their masterly instructors.

The two schools that I first described represent one type of the attempt

that education has made to pioneer a new path through the wilderness. I

have said that many of these attempts have ended by bringing the

adventurers back to their starting point. I cannot say so much for these

schools. The movement that they represent is still floundering about in

the tamarack swamps, getting farther and farther into the morass, with

little hope of ever emerging.

May I tax your patience with one more concrete illustration: this time,

of a school that seems to me to have reached the starting point, but on

that new and higher plane of which I have spoken?

This school is in a small Massachusetts town, and is the model

department of the state normal school located at that place. The first

point that impressed me was typified by a boy of about twelve who was

passing through the corridor as I entered the building. Instead of

slouching along, wasting every possible moment before he should return

to his room, he was walking briskly as if eager to get back to his work.

Instead of staring at the stranger within his gates with the impudent

curiosity so often noticed in children of this age, he greeted me

pleasantly and wished to know if I were looking for the principal. When

I told him that I was, he informed me that the principal was on the

upper floor, but that he would go for him at once. He did, and returned

a moment later saying that the head of the school would be down

directly, and asked me to wait in the office, into which he ushered me

with all the courtesy of a private secretary. Then he excused himself

and went directly to his room.

Now that might have been an exceptional case, but I found out later that

is was not. Wherever I went in that school, the pupils were polite and

courteous and respectful. That was part of their education. It should be

part of every child's education. But many schools are too busy teaching

reading, writing, and arithmetic, and others are too busy preserving

discipline, and others are too busy coquetting for the good will of

their pupils and trying to amuse them--too busy to give heed to a set of

habits that are of paramount importance in the life of civilized

society. This school took up the matter of training in good manners as

an essential part of its duty, and it accomplished this task quickly and

effectively. It did it by utilizing the opportunities presented in the

usual course of school work. It took a little time and a little

attention, for good manners cannot be acquired incidentally any more

than the multiplication tables can be acquired incidentally; but it

utilized the everyday opportunities of the schoolroom, and did not make

morals and manners the subject of instruction for a half-hour on Friday

afternoons to be completely forgotten during the rest of the week.

When the principal took me through the school, I noted everywhere a

happy and courteous relation between pupils and teachers. They spoke

pleasantly to one another. I heard no nagging or scolding. I saw no one

sulking or pouting or in bad temper. And yet there was every evidence of

respect and obedience on the part of the pupils. There was none of that

happy-go-lucky comradeship which I have sometimes seen in other modern

schools, and which leads the pupil to understand that his teacher is

there to gain his interest, not to command his respectful attention.

Pupils were too busy with their work to talk much with one another. They

were sitting up in their seats as a matter of habit, and it did not seem

to hurt them seriously to do so. And everywhere they were working like

beavers at one task or another, or attending with all their eyes and

ears to a recitation.

Now it seemed to me that this school was operated with a minimum of

waste or loss. Every item of energy that the pupils possessed was being

given to some educative activity. Nothing was lost by conflict between

pupil and teacher. Nothing was lost by bursts of anger or by fits of

depression. These sources of waste had been eliminated so far as I could

determine. The pupils could read well and write well and cipher

accurately. They even took a keen delight in the drills. And I found

that this phase of their work was enlightened by the modern content that

had been introduced. In their handwork and manual training they could

see that arithmetic was useful,--that it had something to do with the

great big buzzing life of the outer world. They learned that spelling

was useful in writing,--that it was not something that began and ended

within the covers of the spelling book, but that it had a real and vital

relation to other things that they found to be important. They had their

dramatic exercises in which they and their fellows, and, on occasions,

their parents, took a keen delight, and they were glad to afford them

pleasure and to receive congratulations at the close. And yet they found

that, in order to do these things well, they must read and study and

drill on speaking. They liked to have their drawings inspected and

praised at the school exhibitions, but they soon found that good drawing

and painting and designing were strictly conditioned by a mastery of

technique, and they wished to master technique in order to win these

rewards.

Now what was the secret of the efficiency of this school? Not merely the

fact that it had introduced certain types of content such as drawing,

manual training, domestic science, dramatization, story work,--but also

that it had not lost sight of the fundamental purpose of elementary

education, but had so organized all of its studies that each played into

the hands of the others, and that everything that was done had some

definite and tangible relation to everything else. The manual training

exercises and the mechanical drawing were exercises in arithmetic, but,

let me remind you, there were other lessons, and formal lessons, in

arithmetic as well. But the one exercise enlightened and made more

meaningful the other. In the same way the story and dramatization were

intimately related to the reading and the language, but there were

formal lessons in reading and formal lessons in language. The geography

illustrated nature study and employed language and arithmetic and

drawing in its exercises. And so the whole structure was organized and

coherent and unified, and what was taught in one class was utilized in

another. There was no needless duplication, no needless or meaningless

repetition. But repetition there was, over and over again, but always it

was effective in still more firmly fixing the habits.

One would be an ingrate, indeed, if one failed to recognize the great

good that an extreme reform movement may do. Some very precious

increments of progress have resulted even from the most extreme and

ridiculous reactions against the drill and formalism of the older

schools. Let me briefly summarize these really substantial gains as I

conceive them.

In the first place, we have come to recognize distinctly the importance

of enlisting in the service of habit building the native instincts of

the child. Up to a certain point nature provides for the fixing of

useful responses, and we should be unwise not to make use of these

tendencies. In the spontaneous activities of play, certain fundamental

reactions are continually repeated until they reach the plane of

absolute mechanism. In imitating the actions of others, adjustments are

learned and made into habits without effort; in fact, the process of

imitation, so far as it is instinctive, is a source of pure delight to

the young child. Finally, closely related to these two instincts, is the

native tendency to repetition,--nature's primary provision for drill.

You have often heard little children repeat their new words over and

over again. Frequently they have no conception of the meanings of these

words. Nature seems to be untroubled by a question that has bothered

teachers; namely, Should a child ever be asked to drill on something the

purpose of which he does not understand? Nature sees to it that certain

essential responses become automatic long before the child is conscious

of their meaning. Just because nature does this is, of course, no

reason why we should imitate her. But the fact is an interesting

commentary upon the extreme to which we sometimes carry our principle of

rationalizing everything before permitting it to be mastered.

I repeat that the reform movement has done excellent service in

extending the recognition in education of these fundamental and inborn

adaptive instincts,--play, imitation, and rhythmic repetition. It has

erred when it has insisted that we could depend upon these alone, for

nature has adapted man, not to the complicated conditions of our modern

highly organized social life, but rather to primitive conditions. Left

to themselves, these instinctive forces would take the child up to a

certain point, but they would still leave him on a primitive plane. I

know of one good authority on the teaching of reading who maintains that

the normal child would learn to read without formal teaching if he were

placed in the right environment,--an environment of books. This may be

possible with some exceptional children, but even an environment

reasonably replete with books does not effect this miracle in the case

of certain children whom I know very well and whom I like to think of as

perfectly normal. These children learned to talk by imitation and

instinctive repetition. But nature has not yet gone so far as to provide

the average child with spontaneous impulses that will lead him to learn

to read. Reading is a much more complicated and highly organized

process. And so it is with a vast number of the activities that our

pupils must master.

Another increment of progress that the reform movement has given to

educational practice is a recognition of the fact that we have been

requiring pupils to acquire unnecessary habits, under the impression,

that even if the habits were not useful, something of value was gained

in their acquisition. As a result, we have passed all of our grain

through the same mill, unmindful of the fact that different life

activities required different types of grist. To-day we are seeing the

need for carefully selecting the types of habit and skill that should be

developed in _all_ children. We are recognizing that there are many

phases of the educative process that it is not well to reduce to an

automatic basis. When I was in the elementary school I memorized

Barnes's _History of the United States_ and Harper's _Geography_ from

cover to cover. I have never greatly regretted this automatic mastery;

but I have often thought that I might have memorized something rather

more important, for history and geography could have been mastered just

as effectively in another way.

In the third place, and most important of all, we have been led to

analyze this complex process of habit building,--to find out the factors

that operate in learning. We have now a goodly body of principles that

may even be characterized by the adjective "scientific." We know that in

habit building, it is fundamentally essential to get the pupil started

in the right way. A recent writer states that two thirds of the

difficulty that the teacher meets fixing habits is due to the neglect of

this principle. Inadequate and inefficient habits get started and must

be continually combated while the desirable habit is being formed. How

important this is in the initial presentation of material that is to be

memorized or made automatic we are just now beginning to appreciate. One

writer insists that faulty work in the first grade is responsible for a

large part of the retardation which is bothering us so much to-day. The

wrong kind of a start is made, and whenever a faulty habit is formed, it

much more than doubles the difficulty of getting the right one well

under way. We are slowly coming to appreciate how much time is wasted in

drill processes by inadequate methods. Technique is being improved and

the time thus saved is being given to the newer content subjects that

are demanding admission to the schools.

Again, we are coming to appreciate as never before the importance of

motivating our drill work,--of not only reading into it purpose and

meaning so that the pupil will understand what it is all for, but also

of engendering in him the _desire_ to form the habits,--to undergo the

discipline that is essential for mastery. Here again the reform movement

has been helpful, showing us the waste of time and energy that results

from attempting to fix habits that are only weakly motivated.

All this is a vastly different matter from sugar-coating the drill

processes, under the mistaken notion that something that is worth while

may be acquired without effort. I think that educators are generally

agreed that such a policy is thoroughly bad,--for it subverts a basic

principle of human life the operation of which neither education nor any

other force can alter or reverse. To teach the child that the things in

life that are worth doing are easy to do, or that they are always or

even often intrinsically pleasant or agreeable, is to teach him a lie.

Human history gives us no examples of worthy achievements that have not

been made at the price of struggle and effort,--at the price of doing

things that men did not want to do. Every great truth has had to

struggle upward from defeat. Every man who has really found himself in

the work of life has paid the price of sacrifice for his success. And

whenever we attempt to give our pupils a mastery of the complicated arts

and skills that have lifted civilized man above the plane of his savage

ancestors, we must expect from them struggle and effort and self-denial.

Let me quote a paragraph from the report of a recent investigation in

the psychology of learning. The habit that was being learned in this

experiment was skill in the use of the typewriter. The writer describes

the process in the following words:

"In the early stages of learning, our subjects were all very much

interested in the work. Their whole mind seemed to be spontaneously

held by the writing. They were always anxious to take up the work

anew each day. Their general attitude and the resultant sensations

constituted a pleasant feeling tone, which had a helpful

reactionary effect upon the work. Continued practice, however,

brought a change. In place of the spontaneous, rapt attention of

the beginning stages, attention tended, at certain definite stages

of advancement, to wander away from the work. A general feeling of

monotony, which at times assumed the form of utter disgust, took

the place of the former pleasant sensations and feelings. The

writing became a disagreeable task. The unpleasant feelings now

present in consciousness exerted an ever-restraining effect on the

work. As an expert skill was approached, however, the learners'

attitude and mood changed again. They again took a keen interest in

the work. Their whole feeling tone once more became favorable, and

the movements delightful and pleasant. The expert typist ... so

thoroughly enjoyed the writing that it was as pleasant as the

spontaneous play activities of a child. But in the course of

developing this permanent interest in the work, there were many

periods in nearly every test, many days, as well as stages in the

practice as a whole, when the work was much disliked, periods when

the learning assumed the rôle of a very monotonous task. Our

records showed that at such times as these no progress was made.

Rapid progress in learning typewriting was made only when the

learners were feeling good and had an attitude of interest toward

the work."[18]

Who has not experienced that feeling of hopelessness and despair that

comes at these successive levels of the long process of acquiring skill

in a complicated art? How desperately we struggle on--striving to put

every item of energy that we can command into our work, and yet feeling

how hopeless it all seems. How tempting then is the hammock on the

porch, the fascinating novel that we have placed on our bedside table,

the happy company of friends that are talking and laughing in the next

room; or how we long for the green fields and the open road; how

seductive is that siren call of change and diversion,--that evil spirit

of procrastination! How feeble, too, are the efforts that we make under

these conditions! We are not making progress in our art, we are only

marking time. And yet the psychologists tell us that this marking time

is an essential in the mastery of any complicated art. Somewhere, deep

down in the nervous system, subtle processes are at work, and when

finally interest dawns,--when finally hope returns to us, and life again

becomes worth while,--these heartbreaking struggles reap their reward.

The psychologists call them "plateaus of growth," but some one has said

that "sloughs of despond" would be a far better designation.

The progress of any individual depends upon his ability to pass through

these sloughs of despond,--to set his face resolutely to the task and

persevere. It would be the idlest folly to lead children to believe that

success or achievement or even passing ability can be gained in any

other manner. And this is the danger in the sugar-coating process.

But motivation does not mean sugar-coating. It means the development of

purpose, of ambition, of incentive. It means the development of the

willingness to undergo the discipline in order that the purpose may be

realized, in order that the goal may be attained. It means the creating

of those conditions that make for strength and virility and moral

fiber,--for it is in the consciousness of having overcome obstacles and

won in spite of handicaps,--it is in this consciousness of conquest that

mental strength and moral strength have their source. The victory that

really strengthens one is not the victory that has come easily, but the

victory that stands out sharp and clear against the background of effort

and struggle. It is because this subjective contrast is so absolutely

essential to the consciousness of power,--it is for this reason that the

"sloughs of despond" still have their function in our new attitude

toward drill.

But do not mistake me: I have no sympathy with that educational

"stand-pattism" that would multiply these needlessly, or fail to build

solid and comfortable highways across them wherever it is possible to do

so. I have no sympathy with that philosophy of education which approves

the placing of artificial barriers in the learner's path. But if I build

highways across the morasses, it is only that youth may the more readily

traverse the region and come the more quickly to the points where

struggle is absolutely necessary.

You remember in George Eliot's _Daniel Deronda_ the story of Gwendolen

Harleth. Gwendolen was a butterfly of society, a young woman in whose

childhood drill and discipline had found no place. In early womanhood,

she was, through family misfortune, thrown upon her own resources. In

casting about for some means of self-support her first recourse was to

music, for which she had some taste and in which she had had some

slight training. She sought out her old German music teacher, Klesmer,

and asked him what she might do to turn this taste and this training to

financial account. Klesmer's reply sums up in a nutshell the psychology

of skill:

"Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth.

Whenever an artist has been able to say, 'I came, I saw, I

conquered,' it has been at the end of patient practice. Genius, at

first, is little more than a great capacity for receiving

discipline. Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the

juggler with his cup and balls, require a shaping of the organs

toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. Your muscles, your

whole frame, must go like a watch,--true, true, true, to a hair.

This is the work of the springtime of life before the habits have

been formed."

And I can formulate my own conception of the work of habit building in

education no better than by paraphrasing Klesmer's epigram. To increase

in our pupils the capacity to receive discipline; to show them, through

concrete example, over and over again, how persistence and effort and

concentration bring results that are worth while; to choose from their

own childish experiences the illustrations that will force this lesson

home; to supplement, from the stories of great achievements, those

illustrations which will inspire them to effort; to lead them to see

that Peary conquering the Pole, or Wilbur Wright perfecting the

aëroplane, or Morse struggling through long years of hopelessness and

discouragement to give the world the electric telegraph,--to show them

that these men went through experiences differing only in degree and not

in kind from those which characterize every achievement, no matter how

small, so long as it is dominated by a unitary purpose; to make the

inevitable sloughs of despond no less morasses, perhaps, but to make

their conquest add a permanent increment to growth and development: this

is the task of our drill work as I view it. As the prophecy of Isaiah

has it: "Precept must be upon precept; precept upon precept; line upon

line; line upon line; here a little and there a little." And if we can

succeed in giving our pupils this vision,--if we can reveal the deeper

meaning of struggle and effort and self-denial and sacrifice shining out

through the little details of the day's work,--we are ourselves

achieving something that is richly worth while; for the highest triumph

of the teacher's art is to get his pupils to see, in the small and

seemingly trivial affairs of everyday life, the operation of fundamental

and eternal principles.