been led to
analyze this complex process of habit building,--to find out the factors
that operate in learning. We have now a goodly body of principles that
may even be characterized by the adjective "scientific." We know that in
habit building, it is fundamentally essential to get the pupil started
in the right way. A recent writer states that two thirds of the
difficulty that the teacher meets fixing habits is due to the neglect of
this principle. Inadequate and inefficient habits get started and must
be continually combated while the desirable habit is being formed. How
important this is in the initial presentation of material that is to be
memorized or made automatic we are just now beginning to appreciate. One
writer insists that faulty work in the first grade is responsible for a
large part of the retardation which is bothering us so much to-day. The
wrong kind of a start is made, and whenever a faulty habit is formed, it
much more than doubles the difficulty of getting the right one well
under way. We are slowly coming to appreciate how much time is wasted in
drill processes by inadequate methods. Technique is being improved and
the time thus saved is being given to the newer content subjects that
are demanding admission to the schools.

Again, we are coming to appreciate as never before the importance of
motivating our drill work,--of not only reading into it purpose and
meaning so that the pupil will understand what it is all for, but also
of engendering in him the _desire_ to form the habits,--to undergo the
discipline that is essential for mastery. Here again the reform movement
has been helpful, showing us the waste of time and energy that results
from attempting to fix habits that are only weakly motivated.

All this is a vastly different matter from sugar-coating the drill
processes, under the mistaken notion that something that is worth while
may be acquired without effort. I think that educators are generally
agreed that such a policy is thoroughly bad,--for it subverts a basic
principle of human life the operation of which neither education nor any
other force can alter or reverse. To teach the child that the things in
life that are worth doing are easy to do, or that they are always or
even often intrinsically pleasant or agreeable, is to teach him a lie.
Human history gives us no examples of worthy achievements that have not
been made at the price of struggle and effort,--at the price of doing
things