s acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible.
To realize what an experience, or empirical situation, means, we have
to call to mind the sort of situation that presents itself outside of
school; the sort of occupations that interest and engage activity in
ordinary life. And careful inspection of methods which are permanently
successful in formal education, whether in arithmetic or learning to
read, or studying geography, or learning physics or a foreign language,
will reveal that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that
they go back to the type of the situation which causes reflection out
of school in ordinary life. They give the pupils something to do, not
something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand
thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally
results.

That the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse thinking
means of course that it should suggest something to do which is not
either routine or capricious--something, in other words, presenting
what is new (and hence uncertain or problematic) and yet sufficiently
connected with existing habits to call out an effective response. An
effective response means one which accomplishes a perceptible result,
in distinction from a purely haphazard activity, where the consequences
cannot be mentally connected with what is done. The most significant
question which can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or
experience proposed to induce learning is what quality of problem it
involves.

At first thought, it might seem as if usual school methods measured
well up to the standard here set. The giving of problems, the putting of
questions, the assigning of tasks, the magnifying of difficulties, is
a large part of school work. But it is indispensable to discriminate
between genuine and simulated or mock problems. The following questions
may aid in making such discrimination. (a) Is there anything but
a problem? Does the question naturally suggest itself within some
situation or personal experience? Or is it an aloof thing, a problem
only for the purposes of conveying instruction in some school topic?
Is it the sort of trying that would arouse observation and engage
experimentation outside of school? (b) Is it the pupil's own problem, or
is it the teacher's or textbook's problem, made a problem for the pupil
only because he cannot get the required mark or be promoted or win
the teacher's approval, unless he