lies in the
paucity of the literature that is at our disposal. Most of our
present-day works upon education are very general in their nature. They
are not without their value, but this value is general and indirect
rather than immediate and specific. A book like Miss Winterburn's
_Methods of Teaching_, or Chubb's _Teaching of English_[8] is especially
valuable for young teachers who are looking for first-hand helps. But
books like this are all too rare in our literature.

On the whole, I think that the improvement of teachers in the matter of
methods is the most unsatisfactory part of our problem.[9] All that one
can say is that the work of the best teachers should be observed
carefully and faithfully, that the methods upon which there is little or
no dispute should be given and accepted as standard, but that one should
be very careful about giving young teachers an idea that there is any
single form under which all teaching can be subsumed. I know of no term
that is more thoroughly a misnomer in our technical vocabulary than the
term "general method." I teach a subject that often goes by that name,
but I always take care to explain that the name does not mean, in my
class, what the words seem to signify. There are certain broad and
general principles which describe very crudely and roughly and
inadequately certain phases of certain processes that mind undergoes in
organizing experience--perception, apperception, conception, induction,
deduction, inference, generalization, and the like. But these terms have
only a vague and general connotation; or, if their connotation is
specific and definite, it has been made so by an artificial process of
definition in which counsel is darkened by words without meaning. The
only full-fledged law that I know of in the educative process is the law
of habit building--(1) focalization, (2) attentive repetition at
intervals of increasing length, (3) permitting no exception--and I am
often told that this "law" is fallacious. It has differed from some
other so-called laws, however, in this respect: it always works.
Whenever a complex habit is adduced that has not been formed through the
operation of this law, I am willing to give it up.

V

A third general method of improving the efficiency of teaching is to
build up the notion of responsibility for results. The teacher must not
only take the message and deliver it to Garcia, or to some other
individual as definite and tangible, but he