dditional light upon what has already been acquired. Results are
better, but school subject matter is still isolated. Save by accident,
out-of-school experience is left in its crude and comparatively
irreflective state. It is not subject to the refining and expanding
influences of the more accurate and comprehensive material of direct
instruction. The latter is not motivated and impregnated with a sense of
reality by being intermingled with the realities of everyday life. The
best type of teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this
interconnection. It puts the student in the habitual attitude of finding
points of contact and mutual bearings.

Summary. Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which
they center in the production of good habits of thinking. While we may
speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing is
that thinking is the method of an educative experience. The essentials
of method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection.
They are first that the pupil have a genuine situation of
experience--that there be a continuous activity in which he is
interested for its own sake; secondly, that a genuine problem develop
within this situation as a stimulus to thought; third, that he possess
the information and make the observations needed to deal with it;
fourth, that suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be
responsible for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he have
opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their
meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity.

Chapter Thirteen: The Nature of Method

1. The Unity of Subject Matter and Method.

The trinity of school topics is subject matter, methods, and
administration or government. We have been concerned with the two former
in recent chapters. It remains to disentangle them from the context in
which they have been referred to, and discuss explicitly their nature.
We shall begin with the topic of method, since that lies closest to the
considerations of the last chapter. Before taking it up, it may be well,
however, to call express attention to one implication of our theory; the
connection of subject matter and method with each other. The idea
that mind and the world of things and persons are two separate
and independent realms--a theory which philosophically is known as
dualism--carries with it the conclusion that method and subject matter
of