The psychology of learning / by Edward L. Thorndike.

  • Edward Thorndike
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The psychology of learning / by Edward L. Thorndike. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Leeds Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Leeds Library.

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    PRESENT OPINION CONCERNING MENTAL DISCIPLINE I have tried to give a just statement of facts and proba- bilities concerning the influence of improvement in one mental function upon the efficiency of other functions. It may, however, be that general prepossessions incline me to a too radical view. As a protection to the reader against such a possibility, I close this chapter by a series of quotations rang- ing from the most conservative defenses of a very wide spread of improvement that any reputable psychologist would now make, to even narrower restrictions of improvement than the account given in this chapter would suggest. The student will find further quotations suitable to the same purpose in Heck’s Mental Discipline and Educational Values, from which many of those used here were selected. It will be obvious from these quotations that, as was stated at the be- ginning of the chapter, the psychologist’s expectations of general mental discipline have shrunk to decidedly modest dimensions. I begin with the cases of greatest hope for transfer. “The child tries and tries again to grasp and to fixate and to whistle, to read and to write, to jump and to throw a ball, and at a later age to perform complex activities such as typewriting and bicycling. The development is specific; the formal training of the will is general. The will which has learned to resist distractions can hold its own in any field. To be sure, to learn whistling with accuracy does not help to ride the bicycle or to run the typewriter. Yet this specific character of the training must not be exaggerated. It is, after all, not only the one specific kind of movement which is trained, but the whole group of movements which involve similar activities. In training for baseball we do not train for football and still less for piano-playing. But by training for baseball, we secure general alertness in our motor responses.” [Mimsterberg, ’09, p. 192] “Training of mental activity must be acknowledged as a function of the school certainly* equivalent to the mere ac- quisition of knowledge and the development of inspiration.
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