10.  A teacher of Latin had children collect words of Latin origin, references to Latin characters, and even advertisements in which Latin words or literary references were to be found.  The children in the class were enthusiastic in making these collections, and considerable interest was added to the work in Latin.  Are you able to discover in the exercise any other value?

11.  Describe some teaching in which you have recently engaged, or which you have observed, in which the methods of work employed by teacher and pupils seemed to you to contribute to a realization of the social purpose of education.

12.  How can a reading lesson in the sixth grade, or a history lesson in the high school, be conducted to make children feel that they are doing something for the whole group?

13.  In what activities may children engage outside of school which may count toward the betterment of the community in which they live?

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II.  ORIGINAL NATURE, THE CAPITAL WITH WHICH TEACHERS WORK

After deciding upon the aims of education, the goals towards which all teaching must strive, the fundamental question to be answered is, “What have we to work with?” “What is the makeup with which children start in life?” Given a certain nature, certain definite results are possible; but if the nature is different, the results must of necessity differ.  The possibility of education or of teaching along any line depends upon the presence of an original nature which possesses corresponding abilities.  The development of intellect, of character, of interest, or of any other trait depends absolutely upon the presence in human beings of capacity for growth or development.  What the child inherits, his original nature, is the capital with which education must work; beyond the limits which are determined by inheritance education cannot go.

All original nature is in terms of a nervous system.  What a child inherits is not ideas, or feelings, or habits, as such, but a nervous system whose correlate is human intelligence and emotion.  Just what relationship exists between the action of the nervous system and consciousness or intellect or emotion is still an open question and need not be discussed here.  One thing seems fairly certain, that the original of any individual is bound up in some way with the kind of nervous system he has inherited.  What we have in common, as a human race, of imagination, or reason, or tact, or skill is correlated in some fashion to the inheritance of a human nervous system.  What we have as individual abilities, which distinguish us from our fellows, depends primarily upon our family inheritance.  Certain traits such as interest in people, and accuracy in perception of details, seem to be dependent upon the sex inheritance.  All traits, whether racial, or family, or sex, are inherited in terms of a plastic nervous system.