It may be well to note the chief causes of ineffective college teaching before directing attention to a remedial program:

(a) Many college teachers hold to be true the time-honored fallacy that the only equipment for successful teaching is a thorough knowledge of the subject. They do not stop to square their belief with actual facts. They overlook the examples of their colleagues possessed of undisputed scholarship who are failures in the classroom. They fail to realize that there are psychological and pedagogical aspects of the teaching art which demand careful organization, skilful gradation and a happy selection of illustrations intimately related to the lives of the students.

(b) Closely related to this first cause of ineffective teaching is a lack of sympathetic understanding of the student's viewpoint. The scholarly teacher, deep in the intricacies and speculations of his specialty, is often impatient with the groping of the beginner. He may not realize that the student before him, apparently indifferent to the most vital aspects of his subject, has potentialities for development in it. His interest in his researches and his vision of the far-reaching human relations of his subject may blind him to the difficulties that beset the path of the beginner.

(c) The inferiority of college teaching in many institutions can often be traced to the absence of constructive supervision. The supervising officer in elementary and secondary schools makes systematic visits to the classrooms of young or ineffective teachers, observes their work, offers remedial suggestions, and tries to infuse a professional interest in the technique of teaching. In the college such supervision would usually stir deep resentment. The college teacher is, in matters of teaching, a law unto himself. He sees little of the actual teaching of his colleagues; they see as little of his. His contact with the head of his department, and his departmental and faculty meetings, are usually limited to discussions of college policy and of the sequence and content of courses. Methods of teaching are rarely, if ever, brought up for discussion. The results are inevitable. Weaknesses in teaching are perpetuated, while the devices and practices of an effective teacher remain unknown to his colleagues.

(d) A fourth factor which accounts for much of the inefficiency in college pedagogics is made the thesis of Dr. Mezes' chapter on "The Training of the College Teacher." The college teacher, unlike teachers in other grades of an educational system, is expected to teach without a knowledge of educational aims and ideals, and without a knowledge of the psychological principles which should guide him in his work. The prospective college teacher, having given evidence of scholarship alone, has intrusted to him, the noisy, expressive, and rapidly developing, youth. We set up no standards aside from character and scholarship. We do not demand evidence of teaching ability, a knowledge of applied psychology and of accepted teaching practices, skill in presentation, power of organizing material in graded sequence, or ability to frame a series of questions designed to stimulate and sustain the self-activity of the pupils. The born college teacher remains the successful teacher. The poor college teacher finds no agent which tends to raise his teaching to a higher level. The temperamentally unfit are not weeded out. But teaching is an art, and like all arts it requires conscientious professional preparation, the mastery of underlying scientific principles, and practice under supervision scrupulous in its attention to technique.

We have here outlined a few of the causes which keep college teaching on a low plane. The remedial measures are in each case too obvious to mention. It remains for college authorities to formulate a well-conceived and adjustable program of means and methods of ridding college teaching of those forces which keep it in a discouraging state. It is our purpose in the remainder of this chapter not to evolve a system of pedagogics, but rather to touch on the most vital principles in teaching which must be borne in mind if college teaching is to be rendered pedagogically comparable to elementary and secondary teaching. We shall confine ourselves to teaching practices which are applicable to all subjects in the college curriculum.

PRINCIPLES IN COLLEGE TEACHING

One of the very first elements in good teaching is the clear recognition of a well-defined aim that gives purpose and direction to all that is attempted in a lesson or in a period. The chief cause of poor teaching is aimless teaching, in which the sole object seems to be to fill the allotted time with talking about the facts of a given subject. We sit patiently through a recitation in English literature. Act I, Scene 1 of Hamlet had been assigned for home study and is now the text for the hour. Questions are asked on the dramatic structure of this scene, on versification, on the meaning of words and expressions now obsolete, on peculiarities of syntax, and finally a question or two on a character portrayal. The bell brings these questions to an abrupt end. Ask teacher and students the aim of all these questions. To the former, they are means of testing the students' knowledge of a variety of facts of language and literature; to the latter they mean little, and serve only to repress a living interest and appreciation of living literary text. How much more effective the hour in English literature would have been if the entire act had been assigned with a view to giving the students an insight into the dramatic structure of each scene in this act and of the act as a whole. All the questions would then bear on dramatic movement, on the dramatist's technique, on his way of arousing interest in his story, on devices for giving the cause and the development of the action. In the opening scene we read:

Here we see the guard on duty challenged by his relief, a most unusual procedure. Why does this experienced guard so far forget the customary forms as to challenge the guard on duty? What possible reason can there be for this? How would you read the second line? What words must be emphasized to show the surprise of the challenged guard? If the entire hour were given to the whole of Act I and all the questions sought to reveal to the students Shakespeare's power of dramatic structure, a definite and lasting impression would be carried away. Act I should be assigned again, but with a different aim. The teacher now seeks to make clear to the student the dramatist's method of character portrayal. A third hour may be spent on certain portions of this act in which attention is given to significant facts of language, choice of words, or poetic form. When a guiding aim controls, all questions, suggestions, explanations, and illustrations tend to create in the mind of the pupil a rich and unified impression. Where no distinct aim gives direction to the work, the student is confused by a variety of facts—isolated facts—that are displaced by another group of disjointed bits of information. Aimless teaching leads to mental wandering on the part of the student; teaching governed by a definite aim leads to mental development and to the acquisition of new viewpoints and new power.

We must distinguish clearly between the general or educational aim and the specific or instructional aim. The former sums up the hope of an entire course or an entire subject. In the teaching of literature we hope to develop a vital interest in reading, a discriminating taste, an enlivened imagination and a quickened perception which enable the student to visualize the situations and to acquire the thought on the printed page. The instructional aim, however, is much more specific; it posits a task that can be accomplished in a very limited time; it seeks to give an insight into Shakespeare's mastery of words, or into his power of character portrayal, or into his methods of enhancing dramatic interest. Each of these two types of aims has its unmistakable influence on methods of teaching.

What aim should we select to guide us in formulating principles of collegiate teaching? The question is almost basic, for the selection of a proper aim gives color and direction to all our teaching. In brief, the aim may be one of the following:

(a) The informational aim. A given course in chemistry or physics may be designed to sum up for the student the vital facts necessary for an intelligent comprehension of common phenomena. With such an aim, it is obvious that only so much laboratory work will be assigned as will give the student a general knowledge of the tools and methods of laboratory work; that the major portion of the work will be divided into occasional lectures, regular book assignments, and extensive applications of knowledge gained to surrounding chemical and physical phenomena. A language course may seek to give pupils a stock of words designed to develop power to read the language in a very short time. Obviously, grammatical work and translations into the mother tongue will now be minimized, and those devices which give the eye the power to find thought in new symbols will be emphasized. There is no standard for determining the relative importance of this informational or utilitarian aim when compared to other aims. The significant thing is, not so much to discover its relative importance, but, having adopted it, to devise methods which clearly tend to bring the students to an effective realization of it.

(b) The disciplinary aim. On the other hand, the controlling aim in any subject may be to develop the power to reason about natural phenomena, the power to observe, and the power to discriminate between vital and inconsequential details. If this be the aim, the assignment of subject matter must be reduced, the phenomena studied must be submitted in the forms of problems, first-hand observations must be made, and students must be led to see the errors in their observations and their reasoning. The course which is extensive in subject matter and which relies on the lecture method sacrifices mental discipline for information. From the teaching point of view, the result of the time-honored quarrel between the disciplinists and the utilitarians is not so important as the adoption of a definite aim, and the formulation of consistent methods of teaching in order to attain that aim. Ineffective teaching is not caused by the selection of the one aim or of the other, but by systems of instruction devoid of any aim at all.

(c) The appreciative or æsthetic aim. It is obvious that a subject may be taught for the power it develops for æsthetic appreciation of the arts of life. We have here a legitimate aim of coördinate importance with the two preceding ones; and if we adopt it, the vital thing in teaching is to allow this appreciative aim to mold all instructional effort. It is obvious that a college course in æsthetics must be inspirational, must seek to develop a real appreciation of the beauty of line, of color and of sound. Such a course must, therefore, encourage contact with the products of art, rather than promote the study of texts on the history of any of the arts. So, too, courses in music or in literature which do not send the student away with an intense desire to hear, to see, to feel the masterpieces of music or literature must be judged dismal failures. The formalization of an art course given to the general student, kills the live material and leaves the student himself cold.

(d) The aim to teach technique. An effective college course may select for its aim the development of the technique of a given subject. It is obvious that a science course governed by this aim will emphasize the laboratory method at the expense of information; that a course in the social sciences will seek to cover less ground but will develop in the student the power to find facts and use them to formulate an intelligent conclusion; that a course in biology will minimize names, classifications and structures, but will emphasize field and laboratory work and the modes of utilizing the data thus discovered. We must repeat the statement made before, that no one can set himself up as the final arbiter of the claims of these contending aims. They are all vitally necessary for a thorough understanding of life's problems. The significant conclusion for teaching is that one or more of these aims must be consciously chosen and that content and method must be determined by them absolutely. Teaching for the sake of teaching consumes time and makes drafts on energy, but it leaves the student no richer in power and with no truer understanding.

It is obvious that no general law can be formulated for the adjustment of aims to the needs of students. Teachers have usually found it necessary to change the aim, the content, and the method of a course according to the needs of different classes of students. In one of our colleges science students are required to take two years of Latin. The course offered these young men gives the ordinary drill in grammar, translation, and analysis of Cæsar, Cicero, and Vergil, as well as practice in prose composition in which nondescript and disjointed English sentences, grammatically correct, are turned into incorrect Latin. This description, without any changes whatever, applies also to the course given in the introductory years in Latin to students specializing in the arts. Even a superficial analysis reveals a different set of needs in the two classes of students which can be served only by a corresponding difference in content and mode of teaching. A student who takes French or German because he wants enough mastery of these languages to enable him to read in foreign journals about the progress of his specialty must be given a course which appeals to the eye and minimizes the grammatical and conversational phases of these languages.

There are courses that are foundational and that must therefore be governed by an eclectic aim. In the first course in college physics it is obvious that we must teach the necessary facts of the subject as well as its method. These aspects of the work must be emphasized with equal force for all students; no differentiation need be made for future medical or engineering students or for prospective teachers of the subject in secondary schools. Generally speaking, initial courses in a department are governed by an eclectic aim, but in the advanced courses there must be constant adjustment to the needs of various groups. An eclectic aim can be as effective an instrument in enhancing the quality of teaching as a single, clear-cut aim, provided there is a clear recognition of the relative importance of the ends set up, and provided a definite plan is evolved to attain them.

The aim or aims of a subject or a lesson, once formulated, must always be kept before the students as well as before the teacher. Every pupil must know the ends to be attained in the course he is taking, and as work progresses he must experience a growing realization that the class is moving toward these ends. The subject matter of the course, the method of instruction, the assigned task, now glow with interest which springs from work clearly motivated. The average student plods through his semester from a sense of duty or obedience rather than from a conviction of the worth of both subject matter and method.

Not only must the general aim be indicated to the student, but he must also be made acquainted with the specific aim. Where students have been acquainted with the specific task that must be accomplished in a given period, concentration and coöperation with the instructor are easier; the students can, at stages in the lesson, anticipate succeeding steps; their answers have greater relevancy, their thought is more sequential and flows more readily along the path planned by the instructor. A specific aim for each lesson makes for economy, for it is a standard of relevancy for both student and teacher. The student whose answer or observation is irrelevant is asked to recall the aim of the lesson and to judge the pertinence of his contribution. The instructor given to wandering far afield finds that a clearly fixed aim is an aid in keeping him in the prescribed path. Too many college hours, especially in the social sciences, find the instructor beginning with his subject but ending anywhere in the field of human knowledge. These wanderings are entertaining enough, but they dissipate the energies of the students and produce a mental flabbiness already too well developed in the average college student.

A second factor which contributes much toward the effectiveness of college teaching is the principle of motivation. So long as most of the college course is prescribed, course by course, students will be found pursuing certain studies without an intelligent understanding of their social or mental worth. Ask the student "doing" prescribed logic to explain the value of the course. In friendly or intimate discussion with him, elicit his conception of the utilitarian or disciplinary worth of the prescribed Latin or mathematics in the arts course. He sees no relation between the problems of life and the daily lessons in many of these subjects. He submits to the teacher's attempts to graft this knowledge upon his intellectual stock merely because he has learned that the easiest course is to bend to authority. Instruction in too many college subjects is based, not on intelligent and voluntary attention, but on the discipline maintained by the institution or by the instructor. It is obvious that such instruction is stultifying to the teacher and can never develop in the student a liberal and cultured outlook upon life.

The principle of motivation in teaching seeks to justify to the student the experience that is presented as part of his college course. It is obvious that this motivation need not always be explained in terms of utilitarian values. A student of college age can be made to realize the mental, the cultural, or the inspirational values that justify the prescription of certain courses. The college instructor who tries to motivate courses in the appreciation of music or painting finds no great difficulty in leading his students to an enthusiastic conviction of their inspirational value. It is well worth taking the student into our confidence in these matters of aim and value. We must become more tolerant of the thoughtful student who makes honest inquiry as to the value of any of the presented courses. We must learn to regard such questions as signs of growing seriousness and increasing maturity and not as signs of impertinence. We constantly ask ourselves questions about the round of our daily task; we seek to know thoroughly their uses, their values, their meaning in our lives. Clear conception of use or value in teaching is as vital as it is in life—for what is teaching if not the process of repeating life's experiences?

In the principle of motivation lies the most successful solution of the problem of interest in teaching. We have too long persisted in the "sugarcoating" conception of interest. We have regarded it as a process of "making agreeable." Interest has therefore been looked upon as a fictitious element introduced into teaching merely to inveigle the mind of the student into a consideration of what we are offering it. Our modern psychology teaches a truer conception of interest: a feeling accompanying self-expression. Interest has been defined as a feeling of worth in experience. Where this feeling of worth is aroused, the individual expresses his activity to attain the end that he perceives. Every act, every effort, to attain this end is accompanied by a distinctive feeling known as interest. When a class is quiet and gives itself to the teacher, it is obedient and polite, but not necessarily interested. The class that looks tolerantly at the stereopticon views that the instructor presents, or listens to the reading of the professor of English, is amused but not necessarily interested. But when the students ask questions about the pictures or ask the professor of English for further references, then have we evidence of real interest. Interest is, therefore, an active attitude toward life's experience. Rational motivation is almost a guarantee of this active attitude of interest.

Intelligent motivation in teaching has far-reaching values for both student and teacher. It stirs interest and guarantees attention and thus tends to keep aroused the activity of the students. It establishes an end toward which all effort of teacher and student must bend. It enables the student to follow a line of thought more intelligently, and occasionally to anticipate conclusions. For the teacher it serves as a standard, in terms of which he reorganizes his subject matter, judges the value of each topic, and omits socially useless matter which has too long been retained in the course in the fond hope that it will in some way develop the mind.

The instructor who strives to motivate the subject matter he teaches usually begins with that phase of the subject which is most intimately related to the student's life and environment. Every subject worth teaching crosses the student's life at some point. The contacts between pupil and subject afford the most natural and the most effective starting points in the teaching of any subject.

The subject matter in a college course is too frequently so organized that it presents points of discrepancy between itself and the student. To the college student life is not classified and systematized to a nicety. Experiences occur in more or less accidental but natural sequence. Scientific classification is the product of a mature mind possessing mastery of a given portion of the field of knowledge. To thrust the student, who is just finding his way in a new course, into a thoroughly scientific classification of a subject, is to present in the introduction what should come in the conclusion.

Many a student taking his introductory course in psychology begins with a definition of the subject, its relation to all social and physical sciences, and its classification. All these are aspects of the subject which the mind conversant with it sees clearly and understands thoroughly, but which the inexperienced student accepts merely because the facts are printed in his textbook. The youthful mind is concerned with the present and with the immediate environment. Too many of our college courses, in the initial stages, transport the student into the realm of theory or into the distant past. The student cannot orientate himself in this new environment and is soon lost on the highways and byways of classification; to him the subject becomes a study of words rather than of vital ideas. Why must the introductory course in philosophy begin with the ancient philosophers, and give the major part of the term to the study of dead philosophers and their theories long since refuted and discarded, while vital modern philosophic thought is crowded into the last few sessions of the semester?

The pedagogical significance of beginning at the point of contact can best be understood and appreciated by illustrations of actual teaching conditions. Most initial courses in economics begin by positing that economics is the science of the consumption, distribution, and production of wealth. The student is told that in earlier systems of economics production was studied as the initial economic process, but that the more modern view makes consumption the starting process. All this the student takes on faith. He does not really see its bearings and its implications; he is as unconcerned with the new formulation as he is with the old; he feels at once far removed from economics. The succeeding lessons study economic laws with little reference to the economic life that the student lives. In a later chapter he learns a definition of wages, the forces that determine wage, and the mode of computing the share of the total produce that must go to wages.

Here we have a course that does not begin at the point of contact, that presents the very discrepancies between itself and the student that were noted before. How can we overcome them? By proceeding psychologically. The instructor refers to two or three important wage disputes in current industrial life; these conflicts are analyzed; the contending demands are studied, and the forces controlling the adoption of a new wage scale are noted. After this study of actual economic conditions the students are led to formulate their own definition of wages, and to discover the forces that determine wage. Their conclusions are of course tentative. The textbook or textbooks are consulted in order to verify the formulations and the conclusions of the class. Thus the course is developed entirely through a series of contacts with economic life. The final topic in the course is the formulation of a definition of economics. Now the class sums up all that it has seen and learned of economics during the year. The cold and empty definition now glows with meaning. Such a course awakens an intelligent interest in economic life; it develops a mode of thought in social sciences and a sense of self-reliance; it teaches the student that all conclusions are tentative and constantly subject to verification; it fosters a critical attitude toward printed text.

The college graduate who studied college mathematics, advanced algebra, trigonometry, analytical geometry, and calculus, looks back with satisfaction at work completed. Each of these subjects seemed to have little or no relation to the other; each was kept in a water-tight compartment. He remembers few, if any, of the formulæ, equations, and symbols. He recalls vividly his admiration of the author's ingenious method of deriving equations. Every succeeding theorem, formula, or equation was another puzzle in a subject which seemed to be composed of a series of difficult, unrelated, and unapplied mathematical proofs. The course ended, the mass of data was soon obliterated from the mind's active possessions.

What is the meaning of it all? What is its relation to life? There is no doubt that much of this mathematics has its application to life's needs, and that these successive subjects of mathematics are thoroughly interdependent. But nothing in the mode of instruction leads the student to see either the application or the interrelation of all this higher mathematics. Would it not be better to give a single course called mathematics rather than these successive subjects? Would it not be more enlightening if each new mathematical principle were taught through a situation in building, engineering, or mechanics so that the student would at all times see the intimate relation between mathematical law and physical forces? Would not the disciplinary values of mathematics be intensified for the student by teaching it in a way that presents a quantitative interpretation of the daily phenomena in his experience?

Teachers of philosophy and psychology too often fall into a formalism that robs their subject of all its vitalizing influences. Many a student enters his course in logic with high hopes. At last he is to learn the laws of thought which will render him keen in detection of fallacies and potent in the presentation of argument. How bitter is his disappointment when he finds his course dissipated in definitions and classifications. His logic gives itself to the discussion of such patent fallacies as, "A good teacher knows his subject; Williams knows his subject, therefore he is a good teacher." Day after day he proves the error in every form of stupidity or the truth of what is axiomatic. He tires of "Gold is a metal" and "Socrates is mortal." Few courses in logic have the courage to break away from the traditional formalism and to begin each new principle or fundamental concept of logic by analyzing editorials, arguments, contentions in newspapers, magazines, campaign literature, or the actual textbooks. Few students complete their course in logic with a keener insight into thought and with a maturer or more aggressive mental attitude.

It was pointed out in a previous illustration that the college student "taking philosophy" is seldom made to feel that the subject he studies is related to the problems that arise in his own life. Too frequently introductory courses in philosophy are historical and extensive in scope, striving to develop mastery of facts rather than to give new viewpoints. The student learns names of philosophers, and attempts to memorize the philosophic system developed by each thinker. Such a course imposes a heavy burden on retentive power, for no little effort is required to remember the distinctive philosophical systems advocated by the respective writers. To the students these philosophers represent a group of peculiar people differing one from the other in their degrees of "queerness." One system is as far removed as another from the life that the student experiences; no system helps him to find himself. An introductory course in philosophy should begin with the problems of philosophy; it should have its origin in the reflective and speculative problems of the student himself. As the course progresses, the student should feel a growing sense of power, an increasing ability to formulate more clearly, to himself at least, the questions of religion and ethics that arise in the life of a normal thinking person. So, too, courses in ethics and psychology lose the vital touch unless they begin in the life of the student and apply their lessons to his social and intellectual environment.

It must be pointed out, however, that the social sciences lend themselves more readily to this intimate treatment than do languages, or the physical sciences, but at all points possible in the study of a subject, the experience of the student must be introduced as a means of giving the subject real meaning. In teaching composition and rhetoric illustrations of the canons of good form need not be restricted to the past. Current magazines and newspapers are not devoid of effective illustrations. When the older literary forms are used exclusively as models of language, the student ends his course with the erroneous notion that contemporary writing is cheap and sensational and devoid of artistic craftsmanship.

Courses in physics and chemistry frequently devote themselves to a development of principles rather than to the applications of the studies to every sphere of life. Introductory college courses in zoölogy spend the year in the minutiæ of the lowest animal forms and rarely reach any animal higher in the scale than the crayfish. We still find students in botany learning the various margins of leaves, the system of venation, the scientific classifications, but at the end of the course, unable to recognize ordinary leaves and just as blind to nature as they were before. Zoölogy and botany do not always—as they should—give a new view of life, a new attitude towards living phenomena, a new contact with nature.

Careful inquiry among college students will reveal an amazing ignorance of common chemical and physical phenomena after full-year courses in chemistry and physics. We find a student giving two semesters to work in each of these subjects. He spends most of his time learning the chemical elements, their characteristics and the modes of testing for them. The major portion of the time is spent in the laboratory, where he must discover for himself the elementary practices of the subject and test the validity of well-established truths. At the end of his second semester he has not developed sufficient laboratory technique for significant work in chemistry; he is ignorant of the chemical explanation of the most common phenomena in life.

There is much to be said for the position taken by the "older teachers," who may not possess the scholarship of the "younger investigators" but who argue for a general course in which laboratory work shall be reduced, technique minimized, and attention focused on giving an extensive view of chemical forces. The simple chemical facts in digestion, metabolism, industry, war, medicine, etc., would be presented in such a way as to make life a more intelligent process and to give an insight into the method of science. In the courses that follow the introductory one, there would be a marked change in aim; the student would be taught the laboratory technique and would be given a more intensive study of the important aspects of chemistry. Similar changes in the introductory courses in physics are urged by these same teachers.

Beginning at the point of contact may frequently interfere with the logical arrangement of the course of study; it may wrench many a topic out of its accustomed place in the textbook; it will demand that the applications, which come last in most logically arranged courses, be given first and that definitions and principles which come first be given last. This logical arrangement, it was pointed out, is usually the expression of the matured mind that is thoroughly conversant with every aspect of a subject; it may mean little, however, to the beginner—so little that he does not even slightly appreciate its significance. The loss in logical sequence entailed by beginning at the point of contact is often more than compensated for by the advantages which are derived from a psychological presentation.

A well-organized lesson possesses teaching merits which may counteract almost all the usual weaknesses found in poor teaching. Good organization determines clearness of comprehension, ease of retention, and ability of recall; it makes for economy of time and mental energy; it simplifies the processes of mental assimilation; it teaches the student, indirectly but effectively, to think sequentially. We have all suffered too keenly, as auditors and readers, the inconveniences of poor organization, not to realize the worth of proper organization of knowledge in teaching.

Organization of knowledge has become a pedagogical slogan, but its increase in popularity has not been accompanied by increased clearness of comprehension of its meaning. What, then, is meant by proper organization? It must ever be borne in mind that proper organization is a relative condition, the limits of which are determined by the capacities of the students and the nature of the subject matter. What is effective organization of facts in elementary history may be very ineffective organization for students of high school or college grade. Making due allowance for relative conditions, good organization may be said to consist of five essential characteristics.

Logical sequence is the first of these. It is apparent that the more rational the sequence of facts, the more effective is the organization of knowledge. Data organized on a basis of cause and effect, similarity, contrast or any other logical relationship will help to secure the teaching advantages we have mentioned. A search for this simple principle in most textbooks on American or English history or literature reveals its complete absence. A detailed mass of historical information grouped into administrations or reigns is merely a mechanical organization in which time, the accidental element, and not the development of social movements, the logic of human history, is the determining factor. In too many courses in literature the student learns names of writers, biographical data, and literary characteristics of the masters, but fails to see the development of the movement of which the writer was a part. Events of history placed in their social movements, writers in literature placed in the school in which they belong, give the student the logical ties which bind the knowledge to him. So, too, one often analyzes the sequence of chapters in an advanced algebra or a trigonometry and fails to discover the governing rationale. It must be remembered, however, that the nature of the subject will often reduce the logical element in its organization. Instances in language teaching may be cited as illustrations of teaching situations where a mechanical organization is often the only one possible because of the arbitrary character of the subject matter.

Relativity of importance is the second factor of good organization. A cursory study of a well-organized chapter or merely passing attention to a well-organized lecture reveals at once a distinct difference in the emphasis on the various parts or elements of the subject. The proportional allotment of time or space, the number of illustrations, the number of questions asked on a given point, the force of language—these are all means of bringing out the relative importance of constituent topics or principles. In retrospect, a well-organized lesson presents an appearance similar to a contour map; each part stands out in distinctive color according to its significance.

It is frequently argued by teachers that students of college age should be required to distinguish the relativity of importance of the parts of a lesson or the topics in a subject; that the instructor who points out the changing importance of each succeeding part of a lesson is enervating the student by doing for him what he ought to do for himself. This is true in part, but it must be realized that the instructor who through questions and directed discussions leads students to formulate for themselves the relative importance of data is not only carrying out the suggestion made in the preceding paragraph but is also developing in his students a power they too frequently lack. Those who have studied the notes that students take in their classes have seen how frequently facts are torn from their moorings; how wrong principles are derived from illustrations; how a catch-phrase becomes a basic principle; how simple truths and axioms are distorted in the frenzy of note taking. Through questions if possible, through emphasis on illustrations and explanations, where no other means is available, students must be made to see that all facts of a subject are not of the same hue, that some are faint of tint, others in shadow, and still others in high colors. Without this relativity of importance, facts are grouped; with it, they are intelligently organized.

An underlying tendency can be discerned in well-organized knowledge. Not only are facts arranged in logical sequence and emphasized according to importance, but there is in addition a central principle or an underlying purpose giving unifying force to them all. We can illustrate the need of this third characteristic of good organization by referring to a college course in American history which gives much time to the period from 1815 to 1860. The events of these forty-five years are not taught in administrations but are summed up in six national tendencies; viz., the questions of state sovereignty, slavery, territorial acquisition, tariff, industrial and transportational progress, and foreign policy. Each of these movements is treated as intensively as time permits. At the end of the study of the entire period, the student is left with these six topics but without a unifying principle; to him, these are six unrelated currents of events. In each of these problems the North and the South displayed distinctive attitudes, acted from distinctive motives, expressed distinctive needs and preferences, but these were never brought out either through well-formulated questions or through explanation. As a result, the class never realize fully that those years, 1815-1860, marked the period of growing sectional differences, misunderstandings, and animosities. Had this underlying tendency been brought out clearly at various points in the course, the students would have carried away a permanent impression of what is most vital in this period of American development.

Gradation of subject matter is another characteristic of good organization. Careful gradation is not so vital in subjects of social content as it is in mathematics, foreign languages, and exact sciences. The most important single factor in removing difficulties that beset a student is gradation. Teaching problems often arise because the instructor or the textbook presents more than one difficulty at a time. Teachers who lack intellectual sympathy or who are so lost in the advanced stages of their specialty that they can no longer image the successive steps of difficulty, one by one, that present themselves to a mind inexperienced in their respective fields, are frequently guilty of this pedagogical error. Malgradation of subject matter is the direct cause of serious loss of time and energy and of needless discouragement not only to students but to instructors as well.

Ability of the student to summarize easily is a test of good organization. At the end of a loosely organized chapter or lesson the student experiences no little difficulty in setting forth the underlying principles and their supporting data. It does not help much to have the textbook or the instructor state the summary either at the end of the lesson in question or at the beginning of the succeeding one. The summary of a lesson, given by the class, is a test of the effectiveness of instruction. Summaries given by teachers or textbooks have little or no pedagogical justification. Only in cases where the summary introduces a new point of view or unifying principles, or when it sets forth basic principles in particularly forceful language—only then is the statement by teacher or textbook justifiable.

Teachers are advised to be thorough in their instruction. They in turn urge their students to strive for thoroughness in study. We praise or impugn the scholarship of our colleagues because it possesses or lacks thoroughness. Here we have a quality of knowledge universally extolled. But what is meant by thoroughness? How can teachers or students know that they are attaining that degree of comprehension known as thoroughness? We are told that thoroughness is a relative condition, always changing with accompanying circumstances. Even an unattainable ideal can be defined,—why not thoroughness? We must, therefore, attempt to determine the meaning of thoroughness as used in teaching and study.

It may be helpful to formulate the common or lay interpretation of thoroughness. The term "thoroughness" is erroneously used in a quantitative sense to describe scholastic attainment. We are told of a colleague's thoroughness in history; he knows all names, dates, places, facts in the development of mankind; his knowledge of his specialty is encyclopedic; "there is no need of looking things up when he is around." A professor of English literature boasted of the thoroughness with which he teaches Hamlet: "Every word of value and every change in the form of versification are marked; every allusion is taken up, every peculiar grammatical construction is brought to the attention of the class." Here we have illustrations of an erroneous conception of thoroughness which gives it an extensive meaning and regards it as the accumulation of a mass of data.

Yet the master of chronological detail in history may have no historical imagination, no historical perspective, no historical judgment. He may possess the facts, but a period in history still remains for him a stretch of time limited by two dates, rather than a succession of years in which all mankind seems to be moving in the same direction, possessed of the same viewpoints, the same hopes and aspirations. The professor of English literature does not see that in teaching Hamlet he forsook his specialty, literature, for philology and mythology; that he turned his back on art and took up language structure. Thoroughness is not completeness, because the possession of the details of a subject does not necessarily bring with it a true comprehension of it. Add all the details, and the sum total is nothing more than the group of details. Thoroughness is a degree of comprehension resulting from the acquisition of new points of view. The teacher of history who sees underlying forces in the facts of the past, who understands that true inwardness of any movement which shows him its relation to all phases of life, but who nevertheless may not have ready command of all the specific details, is more thorough in his scholarship. He has the things that count; the facts that are forgotten can easily be found. The class that studies the dramatic structure of Hamlet, that sees Shakespeare's power of character portrayal, that takes up only such grammatical and language points as give clearer comprehension or lead to greater appreciation of diction, is thorough although it does not possess all the facts. It is thorough because what is significant and dynamic in Hamlet is made focal. The postgraduate student assiduously searching for data for his doctorate thesis is often guided by the erroneous conception of thoroughness; he wants facts that have never seen the light. The more he gets of these, the nearer he approaches his goal. He avoids conclusions; he is counseled by his professors against giving too much of his book to the expression of his views. Analyze the chapters of a doctorate thesis and note the number of pages given to facts and those to conclusions and interpretations. The proportion is astonishing. The student's power to find facts is clearly shown; his power to use facts is not revealed by his thesis. The richer the thesis is in detail, in references, in allusions to dusty tomes and original sources, the more thorough is it frequently considered by the faculty. We have failed to realize that this excessive zeal in gathering and collating a large number of not commonly known facts may make the thesis more cumbersome, more complete, but not necessarily more thorough. However, the plea for a new standard in judging doctorate theses is meeting with gratifying encouragement.

What, then, are the teaching practices that make for greater thoroughness, that increase the qualitative and intensive character of knowledge? We shall discuss some of these in the succeeding paragraphs.