In the third place, and most important of all, we have been led to analyze this complex process of habit building,—­to find out the factors that operate in learning.  We have now a goodly body of principles that may even be characterized by the adjective “scientific.”  We know that in habit building, it is fundamentally essential to get the pupil started in the right way.  A recent writer states that two thirds of the difficulty that the teacher meets fixing habits is due to the neglect of this principle.  Inadequate and inefficient habits get started and must be continually combated while the desirable habit is being formed.  How important this is in the initial presentation of material that is to be memorized or made automatic we are just now beginning to appreciate.  One writer insists that faulty work in the first grade is responsible for a large part of the retardation which is bothering us so much to-day.  The wrong kind of a start is made, and whenever a faulty habit is formed, it much more than doubles the difficulty of getting the right one well under way.  We are slowly coming to appreciate how much time is wasted in drill processes by inadequate methods.  Technique is being improved and the time thus saved is being given to the newer content subjects that are demanding admission to the schools.

Again, we are coming to appreciate as never before the importance of motivating our drill work,—­of not only reading into it purpose and meaning so that the pupil will understand what it is all for, but also of engendering in him the desire to form the habits,—­to undergo the discipline that is essential for mastery.  Here again the reform movement has been helpful, showing us the waste of time and energy that results from attempting to fix habits that are only weakly motivated.

All this is a vastly different matter from sugar-coating the drill processes, under the mistaken notion that something that is worth while may be acquired without effort.  I think that educators are generally agreed that such a policy is thoroughly bad,—­for it subverts a basic principle of human life the operation of which neither education nor any other force can alter or reverse.  To teach the child that the things in life that are worth doing are easy to do, or that they are always or even often intrinsically pleasant or agreeable, is to teach him a lie.  Human history gives us no examples of worthy achievements that have not been made at the price of struggle and effort,—­at the price of doing things that men did not want to do.  Every great truth has had to struggle upward from defeat.  Every man who has really found himself in the work of life has paid the price of sacrifice for his success.  And whenever we attempt to give our pupils a mastery of the complicated arts and skills that have lifted civilized man above the plane of his savage ancestors, we must expect from them struggle and effort and self-denial.

Let me quote a paragraph from the report of a recent investigation in the psychology of learning.  The habit that was being learned in this experiment was skill in the use of the typewriter.  The writer describes the process in the following words: