particular.
It invariably involves repetition; and conscious, explicit repetition
tends to become monotonous. We must hold attention to the drill process,
and yet attention abhors monotony as nature abhors a vacuum.
Consequently no small part of the tedium and irksomeness of school work
has been due to its emphasis of drill. The formalism of the older
schools has been described, criticized, and lampooned in professional
literature, and even in the pages of fiction. The disastrous results
that follow from engendering in pupils a disgust for school and all that
it represents have been eloquently portrayed. Along with the tendency
toward ease and comfort in other departments of human life has gone a
parallel tendency to relieve the school of this odious burden of formal,
lifeless, repetitive work.

This "reform movement," as I shall call it, represents our first plunge
into the wilderness. We would get away from the entanglements of drill
and into the clearings of pleasurable, spontaneous activities. A new sun
of hope dawned upon the educational world.

You are all familiar with some of the more spectacular results of this
movement. You have heard of the schools that eliminated drill processes
altogether, and depended upon clear initial development to fix the facts
and formulae and reactions that every one needs. You have heard and
perhaps seen some of the schools that were based entirely upon the
doctrine of spontaneity, governing their work by the principle that the
child should never do anything that he did not wish to do at the moment
of doing,--although the advocates of this theory generally qualified
their principle by insisting that the skillful teacher would have the
child wish to do the right thing all the time.

Let me describe to you a school of this type that I once visited. I
learned of it through a resident of the city in which it was located. He
was delivering an address before an educational gathering on the
problems of modern education. He told the audience that, in the schools
of this enlightened city, the antiquated notions that were so pernicious
had been entirely dispensed with. He said that pupils in these schools
were no longer repressed; that all regimentation, line passing, static
posture, and other barbaric practices had been abolished; that the
pupils were free to work out their own destiny, to realize themselves,
through all forms of constructive activity; that drills had been
eliminated; tha