the desire so to act tends to gain in power. But it is evident that a habit of right conduct formed through fear of punishment is less likely to leave the mind free to dwell on the intrinsic reasonableness of the conduct than one formed through affection for the mother.

The impulse to

act rationally and the desire to please those we love are higher than the wish to avoid punishment. The child whose conduct is governed through affection for parent or teacher is strengthening at the same time his tendency to do what seems to him reasonable; the child, on the other hand, who does what is right in order to avoid punishment is in great danger of doing what is wrong as soon as he can do so with impunity. It follows that conduct regulated only by fear of punishment is rarely stimulated by the impulse to do what is reasonable just because it is reasonable. So far the principle that should control the mother has been dwelt upon. This has been done for two reasons: (1) the best way to realize the proper method of dealing with the child at school is to contrast the influences that absolutely determine his conduct at the beginning of his education with those by which he should be guided in the end; and (2) the same principle that ought to control the mother in the treatment of her child at home ought to govern the teacher in her treatment of the child at school. If the child, at first governed by blind, unconscious impulse, and later by some form of immediate interest, is to be developed into a being who will be governed in what he does by purely rational considerations, then the problem for teacher and parent is: How to make such an appeal to the child's immediate interests as will take him most surely to the goal in which reason, not impulse and inclination, will be the ruling principle of his life. And while it has

been implied all along that no influence can be exerted upon the child that does not make some sort of appeal to his immediate interests, the intention has been to indicate with equal clearness that these immediate interests cannot always be the sort that grow out of the thing we wish him to do. A child may make his own multiplication table In that case his conduct grows because he likes to do it. out of an immediate interest in his work. But when he learns the table by heart, he does it because the teacher requires it. Here again he acts from an immediate interest, but not from one growing out of what he does. He wishes, it may be, to please the teacher, or to get a good mark, or to avoid punishment. Some form of immediate interest he must have. But no amount of pedagogical skill can bring it to pass that this interest shall so grow out of the work to be done that if the child were capable of analyzing his motives, he would say he did it because he liked it. Emphasis is laid upon this point because in the opinion of the author it should be a determining factor in all the teacher's work. Important as it is that the work of the school should be made as interesting as possible, something else is even more important: that the child and the man should do their proper work whether it be the most interesting thing or not.

The Educational Centre of Gravity. Returning now to the point made at the beginning of the chapter, we repeat that, so far as possible, the work of the school should be adapted to the child's interests. How adapted? In the sense that he shall be set doing things which he likes to do, things the doing of which takes him toward the goal of education. We must make the child himself, his tastes,

his interests, the centre of gravity.' Governed as we all are to a great extent by tradition, we find it hard to cut loose from the idea that the thing to do when a child enters school is to put a book into his hands. This was the idea of the Renaissance, the period which identified education with learning, and which therefore paid little heed to the child because he had so little capacity to learn the things that the Renaissance teacher thought important. Under the influence of that mode of thought we have been sending the child's body to school, leaving his mind to look out for itself. And many who have come to see that, since it is the child's mind we must deal with, we must take its impulses into account, are still so dominated by Renaissance theories that they do not realize that the child has any impulses of which the school should take note except those of a purely intellectual character. As the Renaissance teacher neglected every power of the mind except memory, so these teachers neglect all his powers and tendencies except memory and curiosity. The incessantly active child, the talkative child, the child pulling things to pieces and putting them together again, has been ignored, suppressed, taken no account of. Observe any child. Does he sit on your knee and ask you questions by the hour? Is he curiosity personified? That is what he must be if the methods that prevail in many primary schools are right. But though he has curiosity, that is not his only trait; in normal cases it is not his predominant trait. If we are to make him the centre around which the work of the school revolves, we must get rid of the Renaissance fallacy and, with the simple desire to find out the truth, inquire how we can invest the child's

1 The figure is Dr. Dewey's. 2 Cf. Dr. Dewey's School and Society.

capital,1 his interests, his impulses, so that they may bring him the largest return.

As a preliminary to finding an answer to this question we must ascertain what these interests are. And it may serve to give us a deeper appreciation of the importance of our question to remember that there was a time when the purely intellectual interests which alone we are inclined to take account of were almost ignored. The men of the world of the first half of the Middle Ages thought chiefly of action and of the impulses that lead to it. Perhaps they were not entirely wrong. Let us then marshal the child's interests before us so that we may see how they can be turned to account in his education.

Curiosity. It is unnecessary to do more than mention the child's intellectual interests, his curiosity, his impulse towards better cognition, as Professor James terms it. As has already been said, this is the chief impulse to which the work of most so-called good primary schools make direct appeal.

The Constructive Impulse. Closely connected with this is the child's constructive impulse. A little girl of seven, after burying herself for hours in a child's history of the United States, put her book down and asked for a blanket. She had been reading about Indians and she wanted to give objective expression to some of the ideas she had acquired. She got a feather and stuck it in her hat, and asked her father to help her build a wigwam. In the early years of a child's life this impulse plays a vitally important part. As Professor James says, "Up to the 1 This phrase is Dr. Dewey's.

eighth or ninth year the child does hardly anything else than handle objects, explore things with his hands, doing and undoing, setting up and knocking down, putting together and pulling apart; for, from the psychological point of view, construction and destruction are two names for the same manual activity.'

" 1

The gratification of the constructive impulse forms a large part of the play of children. Indeed, if we define play as activity in which the child engages because he likes it, we may say that whatever children do through the constructive impulse is play. They build their sand castles, they pretend to keep shop, to entertain visitors, and so forth, for the sake of the enjoyment they find in these activities." 2

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The Art Impulse. Such activities become modified at a very early period in the life of the child by the art impulse another of the common characteristics of children. A child of three will sometimes throw down his toys and listen to the reading of an abstract essay. Because he understands it? Certainly not; it is because the cadence of the sentences pleases his æsthetic sense. Miss Shinn observed that her niece in her twenty-eighth month showed a special fondness for daffodils. As soon as the passive appreciation of beauty becomes a part of the child's life, it begins to modify the activity of the constructive impulse. The child endeavors to make his creations conform to his ideas of beauty.

The Social Impulse. In gratifying his constructive tendency the child acts for the sake of acting. You who 1 James, Talks to Teachers, p. 58. 2 Sully, Studies in Childhood, p. 34.