he process of teaching. The
apprentice approaches the instruction, in any chance way, and the
beginner usually learns even the first steps with a psychophysical
attitude which is left to accident. An immense waste of energy and a
quite anti-economic training in unfit movements is the necessary
result.

The learning of the elements of school knowledge in the classroom in
earlier times proceeded after exactly such chance methods. Any one who
knew how to read, write, and calculate felt himself prepared to pour
reading, writing, and arithmetic into the unprotected children.
Methods which are based on scientific examination of the
psychophysical process of reading and writing were not at the disposal
of the schools, and exact results from comparative studies of
pedagogical methods had not been secured. The last few decades have
created an entirely new foundation for enlightened school work. The
experimental investigations of pedagogical psychology have determined
exactly how the consciousness of the child reacts on the various
methods of teaching and have built up a real systematic economic
learning. All which was left to dilettantic caprice has been
transformed into more or less definite standard forms. For instance,
the old scheme of teaching reading by the alphabet method is
practically eliminated from our modern schools. It is clear that this
learning of the names of the single letters as a starting-point for
the reading of words was not only a wasting of time and energy, but an
actual disturbance in the development of the reading process in the
older generation. As those names of the letters do not occur at all in
the words to be read, but only their sounds, what had been learned in
seeing the single letters had to be inhibited in pronouncing the whole
word. It seems not too much to say that the learning of industrial
activities on the whole still stands on the level of such alphabet
methods, and this cannot be otherwise, as the real problem, namely,
the systematic investigation of the psychophysical activities
involved, has never been brought into the psychological laboratory.

The pedagogical experiment has shown clearly enough that the
subjective feeling of easier or quicker learning may be entirely
unreliable and misleading. If the task is to learn a page by heart, we
may proceed after many different methods. We may learn very small
fractions of the text, repeating only a few words, or we may read
whole paragraph