It is
evident that one method of teaching must reach the goal more quickly
and more reliably than another. Some methods of teaching must
therefore be economically more advantageous, and yet on the whole the
methods of teaching muscular work are essentially left to chance. It
is indeed not difficult to observe how factory workers or artisans
have learned the same complex motion according to entirely different
methods. The result is that they carry out the various partial
movements in a different order, or with different auxiliary motions,
or in different positions, or in a different rhythm, or with different
emphasis, simply because they imitate different teachers, and because
no norm, no certainty as to the best methods for the teaching, has
been determined. But the process of learning is still more fluctuating
and still more dependent upon chance than the 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.
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