19. How may children contribute to the social welfare of the school community? Of the larger social group outside of the school?
20. How may pupil participation in school government be made significant in the development of social moral conduct?
[XII. TRANSFER OF TRAINING]
Formal discipline or transfer of training concerns itself with the question as to how far training in one subject, along one line, influences other lines. How far, for instance, training in reasoning in mathematics helps a child to reason in history, in morals, in household administration; how far memorizing gems of poetry or dates in history aids memory when it is applied to learning stenography or botany; how far giving attention to the gymnasium will insure attention to sermons and one's social engagements. The question is, How far does the special training one gets in home and school fit him to react to the environment of life with its new and complex situations? Put in another way, the question is what effect upon other bonds does forming this particular situation response series of bonds have. The practical import of the question and its answer is tremendous. Most of our present school system, both in subject matter and method, is built upon the assumption that one answer is correct--if it is false, much work remains to be done by the present-day education.
The point of view which was held until recent years is best made clear by a series of quotations.
"Since the mind is a unit and the faculties are simply phases or manifestations of its activity, whatever strengthens one faculty indirectly strengthens all the others. The verbal memory seems to be an exception to this statement, however, for it may be abnormally cultivated without involving to any profitable extent the other faculties. But only things that are rightly perceived and rightly understood can be rightly remembered. Hence whatever develops the acquisitive and assimilative powers will also strengthen memory; and, conversely, rightly strengthening the memory necessitates the developing and training of the other powers." (R.N. Roark, Method in Education, p. 27.)
"It is as a means of training the faculties of perception and generalization that the study of such a language as Latin in comparison with English is so valuable." (C.L. Morgan, Psychology for Teachers, p. 186.)
"Arithmetic, if judiciously taught, forms in the pupil habits of mental attention, argumentative sequence, absolute accuracy, and satisfaction in truth as a result, that do not seem to spring equally from the study of any other subject suitable to this elementary stage of instruction." (Joseph Payne, Lectures on Education, Vol. I, p. 260.)
"By means of experimental and observational work in science, not only will his attention be excited, the power of observation, previously awakened, much strengthened, and the senses exercised and disciplined, but the very important habit of doing homage to the authority of facts rather than to the authority of men, be initiated." (Ibid., p. 261.)
The view maintained by these writers is that the mind is made up of certain elemental powers such as attention, reasoning, observation, imagination, and the like, each of which acts as a unit. Training any one of these powers means simply its exercise irrespective of the material used. The facility gained through this exercise may then be transferred to other subjects or situations, which are quite different. The present point of view with regard to this question is very different, as is shown by the following quotations:
"We may conclude, then, that there is something which may be called formal discipline, and that it may be more or less general in character. It consists in the establishment of habitual reactions that correspond to the form of situations. These reactions foster adjustments, attitudes, and ideas that favor the successful dealing with the emergencies that arouse them. On the other hand, both the form that we can learn to deal with more effectively, and the reactions that we associate with it, are definite. There is no general training of the powers or faculties, so far as we can determine." (Henderson, 10, p. 307 f.)
"One mental function or activity improves others in so far as and because they are in part identical with it, because it contains elements common to them. Addition improves multiplication because multiplication is largely addition; knowledge of Latin gives increased ability to learn French because many of the facts learned in the one case are needed in the other. The study of geometry may lead a pupil to be more logical in all respects, for one element of being logical in all respects is to realize that facts can be absolutely proven and to admire and desire this certain and unquestionable sort of demonstration...." (Thorndike, '06, pp. 243-245, passim.)
"Mental discipline is the most important thing in education, but it is specific, not general. The ability developed by means of one subject can be transferred to another subject only in so far as the latter has elements in common with the former. Abilities should be developed in school only by means of those elements of subject-matter and of method that are common to the most valuable phases of the outside environment. In the high school there should also be an effort to work out general concepts of method from the specific methods used." (Heck, '09, Edition of '11, p. 198.)
"... No study should have a place in the curriculum for which this general disciplinary characteristic is the chief recommendation. Such advantage can probably be gotten in some degree from every study, and the intrinsic values of each study afford at present a far safer criterion of educational work than any which we can derive from the theory of formal discipline." (Angell, '08, p. 14.)
These writers also believe in transfer of training, but they believe the transfer to be never complete, to be in general a very small percentage of the special improvement gained and at times to be negative and to interfere with responses in other fields instead of being a help. They also emphasize the belief that when the transfer does occur, it is for some perfectly valid reason and under certain very definite conditions. They reject utterly the machine-like idea of the mind and its elemental faculties held by the writers first quoted. They hold the view of mental activity which has been emphasized in the discussion of original tendencies and inheritance from near ancestry, i.e., that the physical correlate of all types of mental activity is a definite forming of connections between particular bonds-these connections, of course, according to the laws of readiness exercise, and effect, would be determined by the situation acting as a stimulus and would, therefore, vary as the total situation varied. They believe in a highly specialized human brain, which reacts in small groups of nerve tracts--not in gross wholes. They would express each of the "elemental" powers in the plural and not in the singular.