sts of the facts
observed, recalled, read, and talked about, and the ideas suggested, in
course of a development of a situation having a purpose. This statement
needs to be rendered more specific by connecting it with the materials
of school instruction, the studies which make up the curriculum. What is
the significance of our definition in application to reading, writing,
mathematics, history, nature study, drawing, singing, physics,
chemistry, modern and foreign languages, and so on? Let us recur to two
of the points made earlier in our discussion. The educator's part in the
enterprise of education is to furnish the environment which stimulates
responses and directs the learner's course. In last analysis, all that
the educator can do is modify stimuli so that response will as surely
as is possible result in the formation of desirable intellectual and
emotional dispositions. Obviously studies or the subject matter of the
curriculum have intimately to do with this business of supplying an
environment. The other point is the necessity of a social environment
to give meaning to habits formed. In what we have termed informal
education, subject matter is carried directly in the matrix of social
intercourse. It is what the persons with whom an individual associates
do and say. This fact gives a clew to the understanding of the subject
matter of formal or deliberate instruction. A connecting link is found
in the stories, traditions, songs, and liturgies which accompany the
doings and rites of a primitive social group. They represent the stock
of meanings which have been precipitated out of previous experience,
which are so prized by the group as to be identified with their
conception of their own collective life. Not being obviously a part of
the skill exhibited in the daily occupations of eating, hunting, making
war and peace, constructing rugs, pottery, and baskets, etc., they
are consciously impressed upon the young; often, as in the initiation
ceremonies, with intense emotional fervor. Even more pains are
consciously taken to perpetuate the myths, legends, and sacred verbal
formulae of the group than to transmit the directly useful customs of
the group just because they cannot be picked up, as the latter can be in
the ordinary processes of association.

As the social group grows more complex, involving a greater number of
acquired skills which are dependent, either in fact or in the belief
of the group, upon standard idea