To begin at the beginning, we may start from the commonplace that every form of economic labor in the workshop and in the factory, in the field and in the mine, in the store and in the office, must first be learned.  How far do the experiments of the psychologist offer suggestions for securing the most economic method of learning practical activities?  Bodily actions in the service of economic work are taught and learned in hundreds of thousands of places.  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.  Methods which are based on scientific examination of the psychophysical process of reading and writing were not at the disposal of the schools, and exact results from comparative studies of pedagogical methods had not been secured.  The last few decades have created an entirely new foundation for enlightened school work.  The experimental investigations of pedagogical psychology have determined exactly how the consciousness of the child reacts on the various methods of teaching and have built up a real systematic economic learning.  All which was left to dilettantic caprice has been transformed into more or less definite standard forms.  For instance, the old scheme of teaching reading by the alphabet method is practically eliminated from our modern schools.  It is clear that this learning of the names of the single letters as a starting-point for the reading of words was not only a wasting of time and energy, but an actual disturbance in the development of the reading process in the older generation.  As those names of the letters do not occur at all in the words to be read, but only their sounds, what had been learned in seeing the single letters had to be inhibited in pronouncing the whole word.  It seems not too much to say that the learning of industrial activities on the whole still stands on the level of such alphabet methods, and this cannot be otherwise, as the real problem, namely, the systematic investigation of the psychophysical activities involved, has never been brought into the psychological laboratory.