and activities, it is easy to locate in the present some obstacle,
intellectual, practical, or ethical, which can be handled more
adequately if the truth in question be mastered. This need supplies
motive for the learning. An end which is the child's own carries him
on to possess the means of its accomplishment. But when material is
directly supplied in the form of a lesson to be learned as a lesson, the
connecting links of need and aim are conspicuous for their absence. What
we mean by the mechanical and dead in instruction is a result of this
lack of motivation. The organic and vital mean interaction--they mean
play of mental demand and material supply.

The third evil is that even the most scientific matter, arranged in
most logical fashion, loses this quality, when presented in external,
ready-made fashion, by the time it gets to the child. It has to undergo
some modification in order to shut out some phases too hard to grasp,
and to reduce some of the attendant difficulties. What happens? Those
things which are most significant to the scientific man, and most
valuable in the logic of actual inquiry and classification, drop out.
The really thought-provoking character is obscured, and the organizing
function disappears. Or, as we commonly say, the child's reasoning
powers, the faculty of abstraction and generalization, are not
adequately developed. So the subject-matter is evacuated of its logical
value, and, though it is what it is only from the logical standpoint, is
presented as stuff only for "memory." This is the contradiction: the
child gets the advantage neither of the adult logical formulation, nor
of his own native competencies of apprehension and response. Hence
the logic of the child is hampered and mortified, and we are almost
fortunate if he does not get actual non-science, flat and common-place
residua of what was gaining scientific vitality a generation or two
ago--degenerate reminiscence of what someone else once formulated on the
basis of the experience that some further person had, once upon a time,
experienced.

The train of evils does not cease. It is all too common for opposed
erroneous theories to play straight into each other's hands.
Psychological considerations may be slurred or shoved one side; they
cannot be crowded out. Put out of the door, they come back through the
window. Somehow and somewhere motive must be appealed to, connection
must be established between the mind and its material.