" It has in view a correct ideal; one outcome of
education should be the creation of specific powers of
accomplishment. A trained person is one who can do the chief
things which it is important for him to do better than he could
without training: "better" signifying greater ease, efficiency,
economy, promptness, etc. That this is an outcome of education
was indicated in what was said about habits as the product of
educative development. But the theory in question takes, as it
were, a short cut; it regards some powers (to be presently named)
as the direct and conscious aims of instruction, and not simply
as the results of growth. There is a definite number of powers
to be trained, as one might enumerate the kinds of strokes which
a golfer has to master. Consequently education should get
directly at the business of training them. But this implies that
they are already there in some untrained form; otherwise their
creation would have to be an indirect product of other activities
and agencies. Being there already in some crude form, all that
remains is to exercise them in constant and graded repetitions,
and they will inevitably be refined and perfected. In the phrase
"formal discipline" as applied to this conception, "discipline"
refers both to the outcome of trained power and to the method of
training through repeated exercise.
The forms of powers in question are such things as the faculties
of perceiving, retaining, recalling, associating, attending,
willing, feeling, imagining, thinking, etc.
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