Of course, there is nothing in this situation which a fifth-grade pupil should not understand readily enough, if he be guided to think through the conditions step by step. But when he first reads the problem he is apt to be confused, because all the conditions surge into his mind at one and the same time, and he has not learned how to pilot his way through them point by point. He is apt to say then, “I do not know what to do." This always means that the total situation is confronting the novice, and he can not start at the beginning, and follow the straight path along to the end. Good teaching would lead him to do just this. A skilful teacher would not tell the pupil anything unless it appeared to be necessary. Such a teacher would simply lead the novice to start at the proper point in his thinking, taking up each factor in order, and making drawings so as to help him break up the total situation, writing down distances in the right places, and so on.

But what is the parent apt to do? His most active impulse is to "help" the learner, which, as he thinks,

The typical par-
ent's method of
"helping" his child

requires him to relieve the child of his difficulties, and this means to enable him to get the answer with the least effort so he can present it to the teacher. The typical parent is interested in having his child arrive at the result most easily, rather

than in having him gain the experience of constructing the situation in his own mind, discovering the causal relations, and thus really solving the problem. So the parent will in most cases tell the novice what to do. The parent may even take the pencil and do the figuring, partly because of his eagerness to "help," and partly because of his unwillingness to take the time to cause the pupil to work everything out for himself. It is probable that most of the work done in the home is of this character. Needless to say, it develops vicious habits of mind in pupils, habits which it is difficult for the teacher

to overcome.

Let us glance at another instance of a common method of home instruction. A teacher sends a puAn illustration of pil home with instructions to bad methods in look up in the dictionary the new home instruction words in his reading lesson, and to select from the definitions given for any word one which might be substituted for the original. The teacher tells the child he can have his mother "help" him, but that he "must do the work himself". Now when the pupil comes to the mother for assistance, this is the way they attack the situation. The first word the child needs to look up is, we will say (this is an actual case, reported exactly as it happened) triumphal. He has not had much experience in

manipulating the dictionary, so he starts at the beginning, and in a blundering way proceeds to go through the whole book until he discovers the letter T. What does the mother do in her rôle as assistant? When she sees how inexperienced he is, she says, "Why, you know the letter T comes after S, and is near the end of the alphabet. You must look toward the end of the dictionary. Find R; R comes before S. Let me show you how to find it,” she adds; and she takes the dictionary and hunts out the letter T.

But the novice does not understand how to go forward, even when he has the letter T; for he does not know what comes after T in the original, and he asks his mother. The mother then spells out the first syllable. She adds: "You know R comes toward the end of the alphabet, so you must look way along toward the end of the T's." Then when he finally gets the Tri, and wants to know "what comes next," she tells him every letter as he needs it, and she also tells him its relative position in the vocabulary. All the child does is to go through the manual process of turning over the leaves. He has not really thought his way through any of his difficulties. Since he was not led to take the initiative at any point, he will be practically helpless if he is ever placed in another situation like this, because he has

gained little, if anything, from his experience to-day which will make him self-helpful in the days to

come.

Some teachers depend altogether upon home assistance in the child's learning how to use the dictionary, which is, by the way, one of the most difficult feats for the novice, and one of the most important, in order that he may avoid waste of time and energy. A distinguished physician recently said that the vision of a good many children is ruined from the use of the dictionary; and when one observes the fruitless, unintelligent wandering through a dictionary of the typical fifth and sixth-grade pupil, he can appreciate that it is a serious tax on his physical and mental constitution.

But let us continue with our typical case. The pupil finally happens upon the word triumphal, and it Teaching to satisfy foris defined by the use of two mal requirements in- or three synonyms, none of stead of to train a pupil which is any more familiar in self-helpfulness to him than the word he is looking up. What does the typical parent do in such a crisis? He reads the synonyms to his child, and then tells him what one he had better choose to employ as a substitute for the original. He does not lead the novice to get some kind of a hold on the meaning of the unfamiliar words-either the orig

inal or the substitutes. He simply asks him to learn memoriter the substitute agreed upon, so that he may satisfy the requirement of the teacher, whether or not he derives any useful training in the process. As intimated above, the parent is not concerned primarily with the value of the experience of a child in performing a task, but only in assisting him to get at the result, so that when the hour of need comes in the recitation, he can render up what he has memorized, and so satisfy the teacher. Of course, if the teacher would always make the proper test with a pupil to discover whether he had himself taken all the steps leading up to any conclusion, she would quickly discover that he had accepted the result worked out by the parent, and absorbed it by sheer force of memory.

If the lessons in any subject be mastered at home, there is some danger that the work will be done in a mechanical, memoriter fashion. It is the writer's opinion that the chief difficulty with modern teaching, as with teaching in all times probably, is that it seeks to get at formal results without regard to the sort of experience which the individual has in reaching the same. It requires patience and supreme skill to teach a learner to take the initiative in all that he is learning-to go ahead of the teacher instead of to follow on; and in this way to be self-active in a