We can here attempt to point out only a few of the practical implications of the view of mental development here presented. Let us first note its significance in the teacher's preparation for work.

Every theory of mental processes must have some relation to the work, but the type of theory most needed is the one that will give her the clearest practical understanding of the minds with which she deals and of the nature of the educative process in which she is working with them as their teacher. All our theories are largely the outgrowth of practical conditions. We construct them to fit the necessities of practice as we conceive them. It is thus inevitable that the various types of educational doctrine will tend to have their appropriate interpretations of the mental life. But not entirely so, for while educational practice is constantly in process of reconstruction, it too often happens that the basis on which the practice rests is less yielding. A theory once constructed is not as readily susceptible to change as are practical attitudes. Hence it is that, while educational thought has made great strides in recent years, the psychology underlying the teaching process has remained largely of an older type. At any rate, it has never been thoroughly reconstructed.

The type of psychology here presented, it is believed, is implied in the best educational theory of today, but the kind of psychology in which we train our teachers belongs to an educational attitude that we are fast leaving behind. We criticized the idea that the psychology of the adult mind was adequate for the needs of the teacher of children. We do not, of course, mean to imply that a thorough understanding of adult mental processes is not necessarily preliminary to the proper appreciation of the mental life of the child, but that it should be studied as a preparation for the psychology of the child, which more intimately concerns the teacher. The need we here emphasize is, of course, felt, and is usually met by a little child-study. But this has always remained more or less empirical and decidedly subsidiary to the more serious psychology. It has fallen into disrepute because it is so ill-organized that it really seems to give pedagogic students little that is tangible and fundamental.

We have assumed that the best preliminary step toward arousing a permanent interest in the psychology of the child would be to present it in an organized and consistent form. We have avoided making our pages encyclopaedic résumés of innumerable "facts," trying rather to outline the method of development and the meaning, in terms of the child's own consciousness, of what he does, and sees, and feels.

It is recognized, of course, that no psychology of individual development is an adequate basis for educational theory; but it is believed that the psychology that interprets the growth of mental processes, and that with reference to their place in the individual's entire experience with all its social activities and interactions, is more really what is needed by the teacher than a description of mental contents as existences in and of themselves.

Educational psychology is essentially a social psychology, the psychology of the interaction of mind with mind. It will surely be an advance toward such a conception of mental life to try to understand, in terms of his entire life, whatever the child does and thinks. That is the more adequately we can determine the character of the child's experience, the nature of his own point of view, what things mean to him, so much the more adequately can our minds interact with his in the educative process. This sort of a statement of mental development is a necessary step toward the psychology of the interplay of minds that the teacher must some day study. The full meaning of a single individual's experience cannot be stated except in terms of his interactions with others. Hence every attempt to interpret the child, to find what his activities mean to him, gives us a better knowledge of the personalities involved in the interaction of mind with mind, and hence prepares the way for a valuable social, and at the same time educational, psychology.

The type of educational theory in which a training in adult psychology is deemed sufficient for the teacher lays the emphasis on the transfer of knowledge rather than on the enrichment of experience. Since, as it is conceived, it is the teacher's business to mediate the transfer of certain quantities of knowledge to the child, she must know the machinery by which it can be acquired. Hence great stress is laid on a clear understanding of such processes as perception, memory, imagination, reasoning, etc., while the other forms of mental activity are relatively neglected. The intellectual functions are studied because, as it is conceived, by knowing the laws of their working, the process of knowledge transfer can be facilitated and its results made more permanent. Naturally, with such a conception of the educative process, the best psychology for the teacher would be that which described these "mental fingers" in their state of greatest perfection in certain types of adult consciousness. Such an attitude tends to set up mental functions, or "faculties," as they should more properly be called on such a theory, as existing in and of themselves.

Herbart's five formal steps in the learning process furnish a good illustration of this attitude. They are conceived as the necessary steps in the acquisition of knowledge, and the teacher studies them in every form and aspect, because it is her task "to convey information" and it is of vital importance that she knows the steps in such a process. The theory of the formal steps is an advance beyond the theory of faculties for obtaining knowledge, in that it recognizes that the obtaining of knowledge is a process of development. Ultimately, however, it is really very little different from the older theory. It tends to crystallize all the aspects of experience around a process of getting knowledge, which is still conceived as of primary importance. It is just because the growth of experience is not synonymous with the acquisition of knowledge that these five formal steps do not themselves represent the true process of obtaining knowledge. No theory of experience can be completely expressed in terms of the knowledge-process.

This is not the place to criticize in detail this particular aspect of the Herbartian doctrine. It is sufficient to say that the steps are a retrospective analysis of the development of experience based on the assumption of its being a process of acquiring knowledge. It assumes, on the one hand, that the child is equipped with a differentiated experience, that is, with a set of intellectual tools; and, on the other hand, that there is a mass of information that the child more or less consciously realizes that he is to put forth effort to obtain. The five formal steps are conceived as the stages in the transformation of this external knowledge by means of the intellectual tools. There is no development of experience emphasized by such a theory. What it assumes is simply a developed experience giving itself content by taking in knowledge. The existence of the mental tools has no organic relation to the process of getting knowledge. They were there before the process began, and they continue to exist after it is ended. This ignores the functional relation between the processes of experience and its development, or differentiation. It admits that they further the development of experience, but it does not account for them in terms of this process of development.

To take a specific point, we may say that there is, in a developing consciousness, really no such thing as a presentation of new material, as is assumed by Herbart. Such a description is from the observer's standpoint exclusively. The point of contact between the new and the old is never thus drawn in the child's own experience. For the child the point of growth is the point of stress in an old experience found to be inadequate in a new situation. The new does not come as something new, but as a means for defining and rendering more adequate the old experience.

In fine, Herbart's steps are the result of a logical analysis of the framework of knowledge. They do not express what the obtaining of knowledge means in the child's experience. We hold that each step in the process of definition must be stated with reference to its possible meaning to the child at the time of its occurrence. We do not have a differentiated experience, on the one hand, and a recognized body of values, or knowledge, on the other, but rather simply an undifferentiated experience and an impulse to define it. The undifferentiated experience includes both the child with his unorganized consciousness and the environment with its unrealized values. The Herbartian scheme is false for the child, and the only type of experience in which it even approximates the truth is the one in which the division of mental labor has been thoroughly carried out, as in the case of the mature scientific student. Even here, however, its application is questionable.

This adult psychology is also the logical groundwork for a theory of education in which the aim is the harmonious development of the capacities of the child. If such is the true aim of education, one of the essentials in the teacher's training is to get a good conception of the various mental capacities in their most complete development. For such, she manifestly must go to the psychology of the mature consciousness. Even if it is said that the aim is the all-around development of the individual, the emphasis seemingly being laid on no special faculties, the tendency is still almost inevitable to give the aim concrete detail by breaking the individual up into special powers. That is to say, there is really no way to tell what an all-around development of the individual is except in terms of his activity, which must itself be analyzed either in terms of itself or in terms of the situation in which it occurs. If the first alternative is chosen, the tendency is to break it up into powers, or faculties. The other alternative seems to be the only one by which we can avoid such a procedure, and in taking this alternative we are to all intents and purposes rejecting our definition of education as an all-around development.

The acquisition of knowledge is only one aspect of a broader process. Hence it cannot be stated in itself, but only with reference to its setting, or meaning in this whole of experience. By failing to recognize this fact the older theory of education confined the teacher's interest in experience to that special modification of it that arises only under certain conditions. We thus expect the description of the specialized mental mechanism of the adult to meet the teacher's requirement for psychology. Let us try to think what questions a teacher needs to ask about her pupils. One of them surely is: What can or does this, that we are doing, mean to these children? When and why do my children reason, remember, etc.? The questions are not so much those regarding what the processes are by which knowledge is acquired, as under what circumstances do these processes begin to operate and what function do they serve in the continuation of experience. To ask these questions shifts the center of interest from specialized aspects of consciousness to experience as a whole. It is upon the nature of experience in its entirety, the way in which it unfolds, and its connection with the necessities of action that a true theory of education must be based. The psychological bases of such a theory must be functional. For solving immediate problems the teacher has no special interest in knowing what the mental contents are, or even how they work. When they are present they work without any assistance from her. According to the functional psychology their very presence means, by definition, that they are doing something. Too often the teacher thinks of them as always present, but not always necessarily active. From the point of view here presented her most vital concern is to know under what circumstances they arise and what part they play in promoting further experience, because it is here she exerts her greatest influence as a teacher.

We now turn to the immediate pedagogical bearings of our genetic treatment of experience. There are two points that have come out in the body of our discussion, about which it will be convenient to center our practical deductions. About these two points the whole psychology of elementary education, in particular, centers. The first point is the undifferentiated character of the child's experience. The second is the imperfect organization of his experience with reference to the social whole within which he lives. In other words, the first point gives us the organization of the child; the second, the organization of his world.

There is a third point of great importance, but it is one common to the psychology of the adult as well as that of the child. It is this: Differentiations in experience occur with reference to the necessities of action. This has been one of our most fundamental propositions, but it is not a deduction from child-psychology alone. The modifications of adult experience occur after the same fashion, and it is from this point of view that we have maintained that adult psychology should be studied. But the first two points are the pre-eminent contributions of genetic psychology to elementary school work. In the case of even the third point there is this important difference between the child and the adult: The latter, in defining his experience in any special direction, has as a base of supplies a previously well-organized experience. This makes his readjustment of himself in a difficulty or his adjustment of himself to novel situations a comparatively easy matter. The child has no such organized background to work from; hence his progress is slower than that of a mature mind, and his activities are modified because of this lack of an organization in other directions as well as in the particular one in which he is striving. Hence, even this third point must be taken up in the case of the child as well as in that of the adult. This fundamental principle of all development of mind is really the more general statement of the first two points mentioned as the specific contribution of genetic psychology to the work of the teacher. They may be said to be the consequences of the fact that experience differentiates as a function of activity. The third point, which states the general principle of all mental growth, involves these two specific problems, or takes these two specific aspects when it is applied to the child.

As we have said, the nature of the process of education depends upon the nature of experience; that is, upon the nature of the mind to be educated, its method of growth, and its relation to the world. It is more than a mere transfer of knowledge from one mind to another. It is a process that goes on through any influence that specializes the child's reactions and differentiates his world, and that at the same time increases his control over his own development.

Let us turn now to a few specific conclusions. The process of defining experience in the child must be through entire reactions. If it is ever allowable to speak of training the memory, the feelings, the will, in an adult, it is scarcely so in the child. If we do so, we must at least remember that our statement is an abstraction without the meaning in the child's experience that it has in the adult's. Our discussion has emphasized the fact that the child reacts as a whole, and any theory of training, in isolation, his senses or his motor centers, for example, is a one-sided one simply because the child does not grow in that way. It may be that attempts at training, based on such a theory, have their effect, but it is a distorted one and not real development. Whatever the child really gets comes to him in a setting of activity, and it means, not merely an increase in intellectual or emotional or motor ability, but an increase in all combined.

The mental processes are inextricably combined with one another and normally develop only in conjunction with the increasing complexity of overt action. If there is apparent growth in perception without a concomitant or subsequent development of the other processes and a correspondingly increased efficiency in action, we may always be sure that there is little real value in the supposed growth. The very fact of its standing by itself, out of definite co-ordination with the rest of the processes of experience, deprives it of all means of being of service to the child. The only value any function can possibly have must be worked out in a common process. Since the normal growth of any one element of consciousness is necessarily co-ordinated with that of other elements, we can see that not only is an element left in the air, if developed by itself, but also that it simply cannot become in its isolation what it would in its natural setting.

As the child advances through the school years, it becomes increasingly possible to develop certain aspects of his experience to the apparent exclusion of others. It, however, is only because his experience has become so complex that there is this seeming isolation in its development. It really holds here, as in the earlier years, that intellectual or emotional growth, to be of a serviceable nature, must in the end react on other aspects of experience, and every scheme of education must provide for the easy transition from the school studies to the demands of practical life.

The second specific, practical bearing of our discussion is one that arises from the changing organization of the child's world. A thorough understanding of the development of the child's world is a prime essential to any scheme of education. In a world of a given degree of organization the child has corresponding functional adjustments to make. For a teacher who has some appreciation of this fact the problem of how to awaken the child's interests ceases to be ominous. He already has interests; they lie in the lines of activity that are functionally connected with his stage of growth. The real problem is not how to arouse his interests, but how to utilize them. Only as this problem is properly met can the activity of one period make adequate preparation for the activity of the next. Each period has its peculiar problems of adjustment; and the influences that are most helpful, or the most educative, to the child are those that help him define himself with reference to the problems of his various periods of growth.

Irving King

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