Читать книгу Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education - Ontario. Department of Education - Страница 21
EDUCATION AS CONTROL OF ADJUSTMENT
ОглавлениеThe examples of adjustment taken from school-room practice, are found, however, to differ in one important respect from the previous example taken from practical life. This difference consists in the fact that in the recovery of the coin the modification of experience took place wholly without control or direction other than that furnished by the problem itself. Here the problem—the recovery of the coin—presents itself to the child and is seized upon as a motive by his attention solely on account of its own value; secondly, this problem of itself directs a flow of relative images which finally bring about the necessary adjustment. In the examples taken from the school, on the other hand, the processes of adjustment are, to a greater or less extent, directed and regulated through the presence of some type of educative agent. For instance, when a student goes through the process of learning the relation of the exterior angle to the two interior and opposite angles, the control of the process appears in the fact that the problem is directly presented to the student as an essential step in a sequence of geometric problems, or adjustments. The same direction or control of the process is seen again in the fact that the student is not left wholly to himself, as in the first example, to devise a solution, but is aided and directed thereto, first, in that the ideas bearing upon the problem have previously been made known to the student through instruction, and secondly, in that the selecting and adjusting of these former ideas to the solution of the new problem is also directed through the agency of either a text-book or a teacher. A conscious adjustment, therefore, which is brought about without direction from another, implies only a process of learning on the part of the child, while a controlled adjustment implies both a process of learning on the part of the child and a process of teaching on the part of an instructor. For scientific treatment, therefore, it is possible to limit formal education, so far as it deals with conscious adjustment, to those modifications of experience which are directed or controlled through an educative agent, or, in other words, are brought about by means of instruction.