129.]

Perhaps the most significant factor to be noted in this, and
in similar cases, is that the successful response to a baffling
situation is acquired, and that this acquisition remains a more
or less permanent possession of the human or animal organism.
Particularly important for the problem and practice of
education is the mechanism by which these learned modes of
behavior are acquired. For, to attain skill, knowledge, intellect,
character, is to attain certain determinate habits of
action, certain recurrent and stable ways of responding to a
situation. The reason why the cat in the box ceased to perform
the hundred and one random acts of clawing and biting,
and after a number of trials got down to the immediately
necessary business of turning the button was because it had
learned that one thing only, out of the multitude of things it
could do, would enable it to get out of the box and get its
food. To say that it learned this is not to say that it consciously
realized it; it means simply that when placed in such
a situation again after having been placed in it a sufficient
number of times, it will be set off to the turning of the button
which gets it food, instead of biting bars and clawing at
random--actions which merely serve further to frustrate its
hunger. The animal has not consciously learned, but its nervous
system has been mechanically directed.

A large part of the education of humans as well as of animals
consists precisely in the modification of our original
responses to situations by a trial-and-error discovery of ways
of attaining satisfactory and avoiding annoying situations.
Both animals and humans, when they have several times performed
a certain act that brings satisfaction, tend, on the recurrence
of a similar situation, to repeat that action immediately
and to eliminate with successive repetitions almost all
the other responses which are possible, but which are ineffective
in the attainment of some specific satisfaction. The
whole training imposed by civilization on the individual is
based ultimately on this fundamental fact that human beings
can be taught to modify their behavior, to change their original
response to a situation in the light of the consequences
that follow it. This means that while man's nature remains
on the whole constant, its operations may be indefinitely
varied by the results which follow the operation of any given
instinct. The child has its original tendency to rea