that the reform movement has done excellent service in
extending the recognition in education of these fundamental and inborn
adaptive instincts,--play, imitation, and rhythmic repetition. It has
erred when it has insisted that we could depend upon these alone, for
nature has adapted man, not to the complicated conditions of our modern
highly organized social life, but rather to primitive conditions. Left
to themselves, these instinctive forces would take the child up to a
certain point, but they would still leave him on a primitive plane. I
know of one good authority on the teaching of reading who maintains that
the normal child would learn to read without formal teaching if he were
placed in the right environment,--an environment of books. This may be
possible with some exceptional children, but even an environment
reasonably replete with books does not effect this miracle in the case
of certain children whom I know very well and whom I like to think of as
perfectly normal. These children learned to talk by imitation and
instinctive repetition. But nature has not yet gone so far as to provide
the average child with spontaneous impulses that will lead him to learn
to read. Reading is a much more complicated and highly organized
process. And so it is with a vast number of the activities that our
pupils must master.

Another increment of progress that the reform movement has given to
educational practice is a recognition of the fact that we have been
requiring pupils to acquire unnecessary habits, under the impression,
that even if the habits were not useful, something of value was gained
in their acquisition. As a result, we have passed all of our grain
through the same mill, unmindful of the fact that different life
activities required different types of grist. To-day we are seeing the
need for carefully selecting the types of habit and skill that should be
developed in _all_ children. We are recognizing that there are many
phases of the educative process that it is not well to reduce to an
automatic basis. When I was in the elementary school I memorized
Barnes's _History of the United States_ and Harper's _Geography_ from
cover to cover. I have never greatly regretted this automatic mastery;
but I have often thought that I might have memorized something rather
more important, for history and geography could have been mastered just
as effectively in another way.

In the third place, and most important of all, we have