4. The self-activity of the child as the method of education
5. The daily life of the child in the home and family and with nature as the natural environment for his education
6. The interest of the child as the basis of the curriculum
7. The study of the child as furnishing the key to his interests, his development, his ways of thinking, feeling, doing; and therefore the key to the methods of education
8. The development of the child as an evolution, progressing through a series of ascending stages which, in the main, follow the same general order in all individuals
9. Adaptation of education for the individual child, according to his nature and needs
The stages of development, the study of the individual child, the outlines of the curriculum, and special methods in selected phases of education, are discussed in other chapters. The present discussion therefore is devoted to the principles of educational psychology and of pedagogy,—how to conduct the process of education.
Education, Instruction, and Training. Education, in the large sense in which the term is here used, includes three pedagogical processes: (1) instruction;[26] (2) training; and (3) education[27] in its narrower meaning,—the developing of the child’s innate powers. Instruction is the easiest, but the most superficial and least valuable; development is the most vital and most difficult. Instruction is static; education is dynamic. Training is the method for habit-formation (which is a most essential phase of education through infancy and childhood), the method for drill and technical skill. The teacher must be able to discern when each of these phases should be utilized. In general, training should begin at birth, and habit-formation should be continued unremittingly until about the teens, although habits are fairly well fixed by seven years. During youth and adolescence, training is needed for acquiring of finer muscular and motor skill. Instruction, directly, is easily overdone, and the best general principle is not to give information that the child could obtain directly for himself by a reasonable amount of searching, use of his own observation, experimentation, or reasoning; and not to overload the child with a superfluity of unrelated information. Certainly he should not be crammed with a mass of facts in which he has no interest, much less those for which he has actual distaste. There is danger that the book will come between the child and the realities of life. Such instruction as is given should be in response to a real hunger or interest. Education, the developing of the self-activity of the child, should begin in the first few days of life, and should be naturally fostered through the careful selection of every factor in his environment as well as through consistent cultivation adapted to his stage of development.
The Biological Basis of Education. Education is possible only because the baby is born so helpless and plastic, with many instincts, with the nervous system great in its possibilities but incomplete in its development, and with few habits formed.
Every stimulus that comes to the child is carried by an incoming (sensory or afferent) nerve to the brain, either directly or by way of the spinal cord. The stimulus may come from an object, from an organic sensation within the body, or from a thought. That sensation or nerve impulse is carried to a nerve center in the brain or the spinal cord, and there is transferred to some one of the many outgoing (motor or efferent) nerves, which conveys the impulse to some muscle, producing a muscular action. For example: the rays of light from a shining, moving object are the stimulus to the child’s eye, and the optic nerve carries this stimulus to a center in the brain. The little baby must receive this stimulus many times before he begins to interpret it. At a few weeks of age he will simply stare, attempting to coördinate both eyes, or later, to follow it with the movement of his eyes; later still, to grasp for it with his hand. The optic nerve is here the sensory or afferent nerve, bearing the sensation; the nerve to the eye muscle or the hand is the efferent or motor nerve. This circuit is what is meant by a sensory-motor coördination, also called by some authors a neuro-muscular coördination, or the reflex arc. Many hundreds of these coördinations are to be made in the course of each day.