Where is Education ?
Donnelly, Francis P.
206 THE COMMONWEAL June 26, I929 lated the automobile in its influence on youth, you will probably have to change your tactics in order to deal with the airplane. From the outset you might as well...
...Others held that the faculties had a real distinction, were different entities, but no one held that they were separate, independent: realities or substances...
...In these experiments, as far as their meagre description permits us to judge through Rugg's and Orata's brief summaries, there is, for example, no evident apprecia- tion of the difference in education between the learning of science and the mastery of an art and the acquiring of a virtue...
...Some thinkers held that these capacities in their ultl- mate psychical state were distinct from one another in thought only, but in reality were identically one with the soul or unifying principle...
...He can be so trained, not by specific training but by general training...
...As the elements are radically different, so will the acts and habits be radically different in certain features...
...Then the system will break down to whatever extent the demands of self require for its own satis-faction...
...You may, if you have an education or general training, remove obstacles and promote good conditions for specific faculties or pow- ers...
...He cannot be taught what is new, but he can be taught the general class to which the new element belongs...
...They must be made to understand that the finest art they could ever practise is the art of the regulation of their own conduct...
...Nobody may ever know how many elements enter into that act and that habit, elements vital, sensi- tive, intellectual, volitional, as no one may know fully what intervenes between microphone and radio horn...
...For him education is located in mean- ing and in concepts, as the reader can perceive from the following passage: In all intelligent behavior we utilize habits, but these habits are controlled and redirected by meanings...
...to teach them that God has revealed Himself in the natural law and in the divine, positive law of the Ten Commandments...
...The physiology, the psychology of act or habit or power, few or none would understand completely, but the old-time answer would be true and intelligible, though not profound...
...Aristotle's unity of matter and form is an intimate, mutually dependent unity con- stituting one nature...
...The minds and hearts of these boys and girls we are dealing with today are made of as fine stuff as any that ever came from the hand of God...
...Specific training results in specific habits which be- come automatic and of themselves dispense with mind...
...The hundred experimenters described by Dr...
...Habit may be a test of past intelligence, it is not always a test of present intelligence...
...Orata agree at least in that...
...You must, if you can, get them interested in this aspect of their lives, and you must make it worth while for them to do it...
...Transfer is to be defined as the extension and application of meanings to new problems or situations in such a way that we can deal with them effectively...
...They must be brought to believe that they can never acquire that art, as they could never acquire any other, without constant practice in the principle of doing little things, as the right way of finding out how to do big ones...
...and you must above all things try to make them assume for themselves full responsibility for everything they do...
...That sounds suspiciously like the faculty of the mind which has held the boards ever since philosophy began...
...It is our task to make them realize it...
...Herbartians secretly assume the very teaching of Aristotelian scholasticism while elabo- rately reducing to dust a straw man of their own fash- ioning...
...Might it not be said that the whole dispute of "transfer" and "formal discipline" is only a question of words...
...Your education, therefore, is located just where the act was performed and where the general habit was begun...
...Man must be always at the wheel...
...Orata, "is staggering," and he despairs even of a logical classification...
...Professor Gates speaks of "fundamental factors underlying human abil- ities and aptitudes...
...He can be taught definitions which will include the new feature in a general way...
...There is no reason why any human being should sub- mit to a "Thou shalt not" if the imperative comes from anyone less than God...
...You should make them un- derstand that you expect them to do the right thing when they are on their own and not because they are under control or supervision, and when they continue doing the right thing over a considerable period of time, they should have some very precious reward...
...Young people must be stimulated to investigate their own natures...
...The eye does not see or the ear hear, but man sees or hears...
...Can a man be trained to meet new conditions...
...Even Professor Gates in the very sentence in which he exiles faculties, brings them back under the "common elements as the basis of the transfer of experience...
...These are surely not idle words...
...We have arrived at a series of truisms...
...If you do not apply religion, you will have no sanction for any law that you lay down...
...Herbart intruded into this simple paradise of traditional education and, as we are solemnly assured, drove out all faculties forever...
...Saint Augustine writes as follows: Memory, mind and will belong to me not to them- selves...
...habit or co6perate with it...
...Herbart's "massed and organized ideas" are somewhere...
...Professor Herbert C. Sanborn declares, in a paper dealing with this question, The Dogma of Non-Transference, which appeared in the Peabody Jour- nal of Education: The mind is not a bundle of faculties, and also not a bundle of functions--or indeed a bundle of anything-- but rather a unitary psychic organism, the whole of which is doubtless somehow involved and modified, or educated, in all of its responses...
...You may call a doctor...
...He had not included in his definition tracks and all they meant...
...Now ask an educator where a student's education is when he gets it, and you will receive a bewildering variety of answers...
...If educational psychologists would adopt a common language such as mathemati- cians and chemists and other scientists have, the ordi- June 26, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 207 nary reader could understand and follow them...
...In the days of horse cars, the driver of one turned out for a load of hay...
...He is indeed haunted by the phobia of faculties, but takes them for granted as blissfully as any good Herbartian who satisfies his conscience by calling the rose a shrub or flower while keeping the sweet fragrance...
...there is a habit and something to sustain it...
...Orata has his own geography of education...
...One automatic habit may clash with another...
...the horse cannot...
...Orata is, as a rule, very sound and reasonable in 0-08 THE COMMONWEAL June 26, x929 his psychology...
...Now before the days of Herbart, if you asked a man where his education was he would answer, "My education is a habit produced by practice and located in certain faculties or powers...
...If a meaning is given to "faculty and to formal discipline" which no one seems to have held, for example, "that mind consists of discrete and in- dependent mental functions" (Orata) then no experi-ment is needed to prove the absurdity of such views...
...Practice makes perfect until automatism results...
...Punishment is neces- sary, but it is by no means the only way or even the best way of bringing about the desired end...
...Orata insists rightly on meaning as an indispensable factor in education...
...The variety of opinions," says Dr...
...Orata, it is true, is not explicitly localizing education, but he does give a sum- mary of tile findings of educational experimenters who wish to determine how education carries over from acquisition to use, and is therefore equivalently stating where the experimenters think education is located in the interim...
...Rather I act through them...
...The singer and speaker and musician and artist and pugilist even, all have the same convictions as a Tilden or a Wills...
...The stages which Herbart demands for education, "preparation, presentation, comparison, generation, application," suppose something in the learner which is the subject of preparation and of the other stages, and so we have Wundt, as interpreter to Herbart, bringing back faculties under another syno-nym...
...This is as fair a statement of the Aristotelian and scholastic position as one could demand, and the Pro- fessor of Vanderbilt University, in I927, taking his stand against the extremists, gives us the true geog-raphy of our education...
...206 THE COMMONWEAL June 26, I929 lated the automobile in its influence on youth, you will probably have to change your tactics in order to deal with the airplane...
...Mistakes, faults, rebellions against discipline must be looked upon as coming from a lack in themselves, a defect in the management of their lives and of their conduct, which, if they are to be happy, they must learn to correct...
...Persons act, not their powers...
...That resembles Wundt's modern presentation of Herbartism and very obviously differs only in synonyms from the despised "faculty psychol- ogy...
...They avoid the word faculty...
...They may not realize this them- selves...
...But what educational theorist today has the hardihood to say anything so antiquated as "Your education is in your mind, memory and will...
...If transfer is facilitated by concept formation, then edu- cation, in order to facilitate transfer, must of necessity be concept building...
...Professor Gates does not, unhappily, give us the scientific studies which did away with faculties...
...As a help in what you are endeavoring to do, you can make use of the general desire for knowledge that makes any regular boy want to know about how an automobile engine works, and induces him to take an interest in chemistry or physics...
...WHERE IS EDUCATION ? By FRANCIS P. DONNELLY SK a tennis player where his skill in tennis is while he eats or sleeps, and he will tell you that he does not know the physiology of the subject, but that his fingers, arms, legs, eyes, body, their nerves and muscles, his own ability to concentrate and to keep cool, all these and other factors have been practised, co6rdinated, and like trained servants respond to his wishes almost automatically...
...On that point he is quite right...
...Aristotle and the scholastics would say the same thing in other words...
...The trained habits of animals are a test, not of animal intelligence but of the trainer's intelligence...
...Of course these hundred views by a few accepted distinctions could be easily reduced to a very small number...
...Habit tends to be automatic...
...His expertness will be shown in meeting a new situation where he must check or redirect or change his habitual train of acts...
...For instance, "ideational, attention and attitudinal," under which headings Orata hopefully suggests that the hundred views may be grouped, are very nearly equivalent to mind, memory and will...
...You do not train your blood to flow or your digestion to operate...
...So too, the will does not will or the mind think, but man thinks and wills with the help of different faculties or powers...
...There can be motives for good conduct other than religious motives, but they will be developed from self--self-respect, self-interest, self-advancement--and they will be strong enough motives, too, to do a fairly good job until the time when self thinks that it will be better served by some other less conventional and approved course of con-duct...
...Professor A. I. Gates in his address as retiring chairman of the Section of Education, American Association for the Advancement of Sciences (School and Society, January 5, 1929) says: The social criterion of educational values found justifi- cation in those early scientific studies, which disclosed the fallacies of faculty psychology and its corollary, mental discipline, and which led to the discovery of common elements as the basis of transfer of experience...
...Orata, in addition to the thirty conclusions which Rugg classified under ideational factors, attention factors and attitu- dinal factors, has added other lands of learning bring- ing the number up to Io 3. Dr...
...Other terms he uses are "aptitudes, adjustments, re-sources, skills, capacities, temperamental and volitional habits, dispositions, character traits, factors, responses, vital features," etc...
...Man is not a machine, not a collection of "discrete and independent functions...
...Let educators tell us the best way to practise our faculties, whatever you may call them, that we may locate in them an education of science through truth, of art through beauty, of virtue through moral good...
...These habits, being the out- come of acts, will be located where they are produced, in muscle, in nerve, in imagination, in mind and in will, and will participate of body, of sensation, feeling, thought and wish, in the proportion that these factors concur in effecting the act...
...there is a faculty...
...One may be a poet or be patient without knowing the definition of poetry or patience, but one can hardly acquire the habit of poetry or patience without models either existing outside or visioned ideally within...
...Your edu- cation, they would say, is located in your unitary psychic organism, that is, in your soul, which took part in every act you performed and must necessarily have had habits formed in it...
...If there were no general training, there would be no education at all...
...Practice does make perfect...
...Wherever your education may be, it is not in a faculty...
...It is not the powers or faculties which act, but it is man by means of his powers or faculties...
...He clung to his old habit which was not general enough, and shook the filling from the teeth of his passengers as he bounced his car over the cobblestones...
...and that their eternal destiny depends upon their con-.fortuity with God's demands upon them...
...From the outset you might as well concentrate on the heart of things, and that is the heart of man...
...Pedro Tamesis Orata (The Theory of Identical Elements, I928 ) has summed up what might be called the geography of education, in his treatise where he gives the conclusions of educators on the famous question of "transfer...
...It is I who remember by memory and understand by mind and love by will...
...Everybody would understand that answer, as they would understand a like answer from an athlete or artist or professional man...
...Their capacities are as great in general as the capacities of the best-living men and women the world has known...
...It is amusing to see mod- ern educational psychology driving faculties into full retreat by a volley of synonyms...
...The soul in Aristotelian and scholastic philosophy was a simple, spiritual substance without parts and never could be conceived as made up of discrete and independent faculties such as Her- bartians imagined...
...The last stage, however, of all philosophy and all science is to introduce us fully to truth, and familiar truth is a truism...
...If there is something in the subject which persists through more than one common experience, you have there a faculty...
...and yet, if meaning signifies definition only, although not a single step can be made in pure science without strict definition, and although in experimental science provisional definitions are ahnost equally necessary, in art and virtue defini- tions are not necessary at all...
...Actus sunt supposi- torum" is the way scholastic philosophers put the truth...
...Still education does take place where act and habit op- erate, or the principle of causality is untrue and so all science untrue...
...they have something corresponding to them in the realm of reality, and where these things are there is a power to do things...
...If you have no reli- gion, you cannot apply it without being guilty of the basest hypocrisy...
...His education was generalized to the extent of giving half the road...
...They carry their skill with them, and that skill enables them to perform easily and consistently in their own chosen profession...
...You have got to teach them that there is something in their own nature rebellious against restraint, and that they must resist it...
...We must try to teach them to know themselves...
...Not for themselves but for me do they act...
...Habit, if persistently cultivated, remains second na-ture...
...you must teach them that one of the most interesting subjects of study for each man is himself...
...Now to get about doing it--and here we come to the parting of the ways...
...Are you going to apply religion to the problem, or are you not...
...There should be rewards, too...
...Wundt, as quoted in Monroe's Encyclopedia of Education (Apperception) says: The more modern tendency has been to revive the notion of an inner activity lying behind the mental con- tent and vivifying it...
...A man can run a machine while his mind is elsewhere simply by virtue of imposed habits, but when a difficulty arises he must think...
...They have, in a word, good habits, habits which have been implanted by practice in trained faculties...
...For Orata then it is not the identical elements but the new elements which are the test of education and intelligence...
...That is one dogma which modern educational theorists seem never to question or doubt...
...Experimenters and theorists in the matter of train- ing should not be under the impression that all training whether of muscle or of imagination or of mind or of will is to be carried on and perfected in the same way...
...Even Herbart himself did not expel faculties except by a synonym...
...Basis of experience" is only one of a dozen or more synonyms by which the hateful term, faculty, is banished by Professor Gates from polite society...
...If, however, you have the courage of your convictions, you have first got to teach young people their responsibility to God...
Vol. 10 • June 1929 • No. 8
