xford
could do for its students, is said to have replied, "Oxford can teach an
English gentleman how to _be_ an English gentleman." But, if you ask
what it means to 'be' an English gentleman, the only reply is in terms
of conduct and behavior. An English gentleman is a bundle of
specifically qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies
of life has his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him in
advance. Here, as elsewhere, England expects every man to do his duty.

V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS

If all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which
ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in
the classroom.

_No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative
expression_,--this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to
forget.

An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in
no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is
physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind it in the way of
capacity acquired. Even as mere impression, it fails to produce its
proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain fully among the
acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole
cycle of our operations. Its _motor consequences_ are what clinch it.
Some effect due to it in the way of an activity must return to the mind
in the form of the _sensation of having acted_, and connect itself with
the impression. The most durable impressions are those on account of
which we speak or act, or else are inwardly convulsed.

The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them
parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely
read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest
possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is thus
a highly important kind of reactive behavior on our impressions; and it
is to be feared that, in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations
as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal
recitation as an element of complete training may nowadays be too much
forgotten.

When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of
reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those
methods of concrete object teaching which are the glory of our
contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as they are, are
insufficient. Th