them from their own
standpoint, whenever there is genuine learning. (ii) In the normal
process of becoming acquainted with subject matter already known to
others, even young pupils react in unexpected ways. There is something
fresh, something not capable of being fully anticipated by even the
most experienced teacher, in the ways they go at the topic, and in
the particular ways in which things strike them. Too often all this is
brushed aside as irrelevant; pupils are deliberately held to rehearsing
material in the exact form in which the older person conceives it. The
result is that what is instinctively original in individuality, that
which marks off one from another, goes unused and undirected. Teaching
then ceases to be an educative process for the teacher. At most he
learns simply to improve his existing technique; he does not get new
points of view; he fails to experience any intellectual companionship.
Hence both teaching and learning tend to become conventional and
mechanical with all the nervous strain on both sides therein implied.

As maturity increases and as the student has a greater background of
familiarity upon which a new topic is projected, the scope of more or
less random physical experimentation is reduced. Activity is defined or
specialized in certain channels. To the eyes of others, the student may
be in a position of complete physical quietude, because his energies are
confined to nerve channels and to the connected apparatus of the eyes
and vocal organs. But because this attitude is evidence of intense
mental concentration on the part of the trained person, it does not
follow that it should be set up as a model for students who still have
to find their intellectual way about. And even with the adult, it does
not cover the whole circuit of mental energy. It marks an intermediate
period, capable of being lengthened with increased mastery of a
subject, but always coming between an earlier period of more general and
conspicuous organic action and a later time of putting to use what has
been apprehended.

When, however, education takes cognizance of the union of mind and body
in acquiring knowledge, we are not obliged to insist upon the need of
obvious, or external, freedom. It is enough to identify the freedom
which is involved in teaching and studying with the thinking by which
what a person already knows and believes is enlarged and refined. If
attention is centered upon the conditions which have