open-mindedness, while ability to repeat catch phrases, cant terms, familiar propositions, gives the conceit of learning and coats the mind with a varnish waterproof to new ideas. (4: 176-177)

Examples of misinterpretation of historical statement. — There are hundreds of current examples of the failure of students to get the meanings of statements which they learn in their lessons and recite glibly to the teacher. For instance, a prominent American educator relates that in the upper grades of the elementary school he learned the statement that the invention of the cotton gin fastened slavery upon the South. The only gin of which he had any knowledge was the liquor to which he had heard his parents refer as being a terrible thing to drink. Hence he concluded that the invention of a liquor made from cotton, which was known as cotton gin and drunk by the negroes, somehow fastened slavery upon the South. In later years he contrasted the way he was taught with the modern method of making clear to students the difficulties of separating cotton from the seeds and the various stages in the development of ginning machinery.

All instruction must be adapted to experience and development of students. The phase of the principle of apperception which we have been discussing is easily applied in detail to high-school instruction. Since all instruction must be adapted to the past experience of the students, we must make sure that they have had the detailed personal experiences necessary to enable them to grasp the abstract and general meanings which we may be trying to teach; that the problems which we expect them to solve involve relationships with which they are familiar and which are within the range of their ability; that the music and literature which they are expected to enjoy are adapted to the stage of development that they have reached, that is, are built upon the habits of enjoyment which they already possess; and that topics for themes are drawn from the typical activities of adolescent boys and girls.

Endeavor to utilize out-of-school experiences. To make these applications skillfully it is necessary for the high-school teacher to become a close student of the characteristics and experiences of high-school students, not only in school but out of school. The necessity of linking up instruction with out-of-school experiences is emphasized by Dewey in the following quotation :

All students of psychology are familiar with the principle of apperception that we assimilate new material with what we have digested and retained from prior experiences. Now the " apperceptive basis" of material furnished by teacher and textbook should be found as far as possible in what the learner has derived from more direct forms of his own experience. There is a tendency to connect material of the schoolroom simply with the material of prior school lessons, instead of linking it to what the pupil has acquired in his out-of-school experience. The teacher says, "Do you not remember what we learned from the book last week?" instead of saying, "Do you not recall such and such a thing that you have seen or heard?" As a result there are built up detached and independent systems of school knowledge that inertly overlay the ordinary systems of experience instead of reacting to enlarge and refine them. Pupils are taught to live in two separate worlds, one the world of out-of-school experience, the other the world of books and lessons. (4: 199)

Influence of present frame of mind. Example of mistake in reading. We shall now turn from the discussion of the influence of past experience to a consideration of the second factor in determining a person's response to a situation; namely, his present frame of mind. This was illustrated above in connection with the word bay, but additional examples may be given here to assist in getting the idea clearly in mind. The following incident from my own experience will serve this purpose.

I was riding in a train and happened to look over the shoulder of the man in front of me at the newspaper which he was reading.

I could just see the top of the paper and read there the following large headline, extending clear across the page:

GOOD HATS A QUARTER

Inasmuch as I always take advantage of end-of-the-season reduction sales of men's furnishings, this statement interested me (although good hats for a quarter seemed impossible) and I decided to look into the matter further when I got a chance. Soon the man left his seat to go into the smoking car. I picked up his paper and, turning to the desired page, found that instead of reading

the headline read

GOOD HATS A QUARTER

GOD HATES A QUITTER

It was Monday morning, and the paper in question contained reports of Sunday sermons printed with large-type headlines running clear across the page. If I had been in the religious frame of mind at the time, instead of the bargain-hunting frame of mind, I might have read the headline correctly at the first glance.

Present mental background determines interpretation. The whole matter of the influence of mental backgrounds upon the interpretation of a given stimulus is well discussed by Adams in his "Exposition and Illustration in Teaching." He says that an idea

must take a different meaning according to the mental background against which it is projected. The presented content may be quite neutral or it may have a positive tone of its own [to use terms borrowed from the field of color]. In both cases the new idea or ideas must submit to a modification of tone or meaning from the effect of the background.

Take some such colorless sentence as Think of him," and note the difference effected by projecting it against the following backgrounds:

A picture in Life of a low-class photographer trying to encourage a pleasant expression on his female sitter's face.

A widow laying flowers on a grave and addressing her little girl.

A religious revival meeting.

A French schoolmaster during the Franco-Prussian War pointing to a portrait of the first Napoleon.

A conspirators' meeting where a traitor's name has been mentioned.

A crowd of starving "unemployed" watching the mayor pass from his carriage to a city banquet. (1: 93)

Examples of students misinterpreting questions. - Pedagogical examples of the principle that an individual's mental response is influenced by his present frame of mind are numerous. Even when the students have had the adequate past experience for making the desired response, it is often not secured by the teacher, because the present mental conditions are unfavorable. Hence, Adams says:

Young teachers in particular soon discover that their questions do not produce the answers they were intended to elicit. A question is asked, for example, the answer to which is known to be within the range of the pupil's knowledge. There is no doubt about the matter. The teacher knows from immediately preceding experience that the answer is in the pupil's mind only waiting to be drawn out. Indeed, the question may be fairly regarded as nothing more than a stage in the process of making clear and distinct an idea that the pupil already possesses, though in a vague way. The question is, however, so expressed that the pupil, with the best intention in the world, cannot discover against which background he is expected to project the ideas concerned. Accordingly he projects them against the first available background, in the hope that this may be the right one.

"Where was St. Paul converted?" asks the teacher, speaking from a geographical background. "In the ninth chapter of the Acts," responds the pupil, from a background of textual reference. In testing the intelligence of a class the inspector asks, "Where do you find gates?" The pupil, from a background made up of puzzling experiences of the Socratic method, answers: "We don't find gates; we make them." From a historico-geographical background the inspector desired to elicit the deleterious effect of a

large town on the purity of a river. He brought out the fact that Robert the Bruce [1274-1329] spent his latter years at Roseneath on the Clyde in Scotland, and that as a recreation he very probably according to the inspector-fished in the river. The question that was to incriminate those who were responsible for the pollution of the Clyde took the form, "Why could n't the Bruce fish there now?" From a background of plain common sense came the reply, "Because he's dead." (1: 96)

Teacher must put students in proper frame of mind. These examples make it evident that it is the teacher's business to see that pupils are put into the proper frame of mind to make the general type of educative responses that he desires. This is particularly important (1) at the beginning of a period of instruction, (2) in taking up a new topic, (3) in making transitions in the continuous treatment of a topic. In the case of intellectual instruction such a preparation of the pupil's mind commonly involves an introductory or transitional discussion which will inform the students concerning the purposes of the lesson, the problems to be discussed, their general significance or bearing, etc. This notion of preparation was especially emphasized by Herbart (1776–1841), the great German educational reformer, and by his followers. One of Herbart's statements concerning the matter is the following:

A rule of vital importance is that, before setting his pupils at work, the teacher should take them into the field of ideas wherein their work is to be done. He can accomplish this at the beginning of a recitation hour by means of a brief outline view of the ground to be covered in the lesson or lecture.

Preparatory step may include discussion of purpose of lesson. The technique of the initial, or preparatory, step in the teaching of lessons has been very extensively discussed by the followers of Herbart. Their contention has usually taken the form of an assertion that the aim of the lesson should be stated at the beginning and should be considered