iew, the recitation is a form of educative
activity rather than a mere time allotment. In this sense the
recitation is a process of instruction, a mode of teaching, wherein
pupils and teacher, facing a common situation, proceed toward a more
or less conscious end. It is a distinct movement in classroom
experience, so organized that a definite beginning, progression, and
end are clearly distinguishable. Thus we speak of the method of the
recitation, the five formal steps of the recitation, or the various
types of recitation. Such a usage makes "recitation" synonymous with
"lesson." Indeed, when we pass from general pedagogical discussion to
a detailed treatment of special methods of teaching, we usually
abandon the term "recitation" and use the word "lesson." Although
there is always some notion of a time-period in the curriculum in our
idea of a lesson, yet the term "lesson" is more intimately connected
with the thought of a teaching exercise in which ideas are developed
and fixed in memory. It is through the lesson or recitation that
pupils and teachers influence one another's thought and action; and
when this condition exists, there is always educative activity.

These two ways of thinking of the recitation, one primarily
administrative and the other primarily educative, need to be somewhat
sharply differentiated in our thinking. However closely related they
are in actual schoolroom work, however greatly they influence each
other in practice, they require a theoretic separation. Only by this
method can we avoid some of the error and confusion current in
teaching theory and practice. A single instance will suffice to show
the value of the distinction.

No one of us would deliberately assume that the teaching process
required for the instruction of a child would just cover the twenty,
thirty, or forty minutes allotted to the class-period, day after day
and year after year, regardless of the subject presented or the child
taught. Yet this is precisely the sort of assumption that is implied
throughout a considerable portion of our current discussion of the
teaching process. We talk about a "developmental-lesson" or a
"review-recitation" in, say, geography, as though it began and ended
with the recitation-period of the day. The daily lesson-plans we
demand of apprentice-teachers in training-schools are largely built
upon this basis.

Of course the fact that one must begin a theme at a given moment and
close at a simila