f procedure, but are facilitated and directed by the latter.
The instance may serve to point out the value to the teacher of a
knowledge of the psychological methods and the empirical devices found
useful in the past. When they get in the way of his own common sense,
when they come between him and the situation in which he has to act,
they are worse than useless. But if he has acquired them as intellectual
aids in sizing up the needs, resources, and difficulties of the unique
experiences in which he engages, they are of constructive value. In the
last resort, just because everything depends upon his own methods of
response, much depends upon how far he can utilize, in making his own
response, the knowledge which has accrued in the experience of others.
As already intimated, every word of this account is directly applicable
also to the method of the pupil, the way of learning. To suppose that
students, whether in the primary school or in the university, can
be supplied with models of method to be followed in acquiring and
expounding a subject is to fall into a self-deception that has
lamentable consequences. (See ante, p. 169.) One must make his own
reaction in any case. Indications of the standardized or general methods
used in like cases by others--particularly by those who are already
experts--are of worth or of harm according as they make his personal
reaction more intelligent or as they induce a person to dispense with
exercise of his own judgment. If what was said earlier (See p. 159)
about originality of thought seemed overstrained, demanding more of
education than the capacities of average human nature permit, the
difficulty is that we lie under the incubus of a superstition. We have
set up the notion of mind at large, of intellectual method that is the
same for all. Then we regard individuals as differing in the quantity of
mind with which they are charged. Ordinary persons are then expected to
be ordinary. Only the exceptional are allowed to have originality. The
measure of difference between the average student and the genius is a
measure of the absence of originality in the former. But this notion
of mind in general is a fiction. How one person's abilities compare in
quantity with those of another is none of the teacher's business. It is
irrelevant to his work. What is required is that every individual shall
have opportunities to employ his own powers in activities that have
meaning. Mind, individual method, or