Excerpt from Learning by Doing The chief business of the child and of the youth in American life to-day is to master some portion of the knowledge and the skill which our ancestors have found of service in their experiences in the art of living; and it follows that the chief problems of the parent and the teacher have to do with helping the young to acquire this knowledge and skill in an economical and effective manner. No one in our time, who is at all familiar with the matter, can doubt that both the child and his instructor, whether he be parent or teacher, have to deal with a very complicated situation in the present-day home and school. There is a constantly increasing body of material to be learned, and the period for learning it is not being extended, so that it is becoming ever more imperative for those who instruct the young to adopt methods of procedure which will enable the novice to master what he must learn without waste of time or energy. This is, of course, an ideal which has not yet been attained in any of our educational work, as every student of education and every intelligent parent and teacher knows very well. But we are certainly making progress. We are discovering from time to time how to guide the child so that he will appropriate the more readily and competently what we believe we ought to teach him. Doubtless most of those who will read these lines have witnessed marked changes in the teaching of practically every subject in the curriculum of the elementary and the high school; and probably these changes have all been in the direction of attaining greater economy and efficiency in educational work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books.

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