]

I

In its widest aspects, the problem of teaching pupils how to study forms
a large part of the larger educational problem. It means, not only
teaching them how to read books, and to make the content of books part
of their own mental capital, but also, and perhaps far more
significantly, teaching them how to draw lessons from their own
experiences; not only how to observe and classify and draw conclusions,
but also how to evaluate their experience--how to judge whether certain
things that they do give adequate or inadequate results.

In the narrower sense, however, the art of study may be said to consist
in the ability to assimilate the experiences of others, and it is in
this narrower sense that I shall discuss the problem to-day. It is not
only in books that human experience is recorded, and yet it is true that
the reading of books is the most economical means of gaining these
experiences; consequently, we may still further narrow our problem to
this: How may pupils be trained effectively to glean, through the medium
of the printed page, the great lessons of race experience?

The word "study" is thus used in the sense in which most teachers employ
it. When we speak of a pupil's studying his lessons, we commonly mean
that he is bending over a text-book, attempting to assimilate the
contents of the text. Just what it means to study, even in this narrow
sense of the term,--just what it means, psychologically, to assimilate
even the simplest thoughts of others,--I cannot tell you, and I do not
know of any one who can answer this seemingly simple question
satisfactorily. We all study, but what happens in our minds when we do
study is a mystery. We all do some thinking, and yet the psychology of
thinking is the great undiscovered and unexplored region in the field of
mental science. Until we know something of the psychology of thinking,
we can hope for very little definite information concerning the
psychology of study, for study is so intimately bound up with thinking
that the two are not to be separated.

But even if it is impossible at the present time to analyze the process
of studying, we are pretty well agreed as to what constitutes successful
study, and many rules have been formulated for helping pupils to acquire
effective habits of study. These rules concern us only indirectly at the
present time, for our problem is still narrower in its scope. It has to
do with the possibility of so training children in