8.  Explain how the power of appreciation is dependent upon training.

9.  What values in the education of an individual are realized through growth in power of appreciation?

10.  Why is it important for a teacher to seek to cultivate his own power of appreciation?

11.  What poems, or pictures, or music would you expect first-grade children to enjoy?  Why?

12.  Would you expect fifth-grade children to grow in appreciation of poetry by having them commit to memory selections from Milton’s Paradise Lost?  Why?

13.  Why is it important to allow children to choose the poems that they commit to memory, or the pictures which they hang on their walls?

14.  Why would you accept spontaneous expression of approval of the characters in literature or in history, rather than seek to control the judgments of children in this respect?

15.  How may teachers prove most effective in developing the power of appreciation upon the part of children?

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IX.  THE MEANING OF PLAY IN EDUCATION

All human activity might be classified under three heads,—­play, work, and drudgery,—­but just what activities belong under each head and just what each of the terms means are questions of dispute.  That the boundaries between the three are hazy and undefined, and that they shade gradually into each other, are without doubt true, but after all play is different from work, and work from drudgery.  Much of the disagreement as to the value of play is due to this lack of definition.  Even to-day when the worth of play is so universally recognized, we still hear the criticism’s of “soft pedagogy” and “sugar coating” used in connection with the application of the principle of play in education.

Although what we call play has its roots in original equipment, still there is no such thing as the play instinct, in the sense that there is a hunting instinct or a fighting instinct.  Instead of being a definite instinct, which means a definite response to a definite situation, it is rather a tendency characteristic of all instincts and capacities.  It is an outgrowth of the general characteristic of all original nature towards activity of some kind.  This tendency is so broad and so complex, the machinery governing it is so delicate, that it produces responses that vary tremendously with subtle changes in the individual, and with slight modifications of the situation.  What we call play, then, is nothing more than the manifestations of the various instincts and capacities as they appear at times when they are not immediately useful.  The connections in the nervous system are ripe and all other factors have operated to put them in a state of readiness:  a situation occurs which stimulates these connections and the child plays.  These connections called into activity may result in responses which are primarily physical, intellectual,