Education a First Book Author:Edward Lee Thorndike General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1912 Original Publisher: Macmillan Subjects: Education Education / General Education / Educational Psychology History / General Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy th... more »e General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. Excerpt: Chapter Iv The Material For Education: General Facts And Laws The aim of education is, we have seen, to change human beings for the better, so that they Education and wil1 nave more humane and useful the sciences of wants and be more able to satisfy human nature. tnem Human individuals, especially the young, are the material for education; and knowledge of human nature is necessary if educational changes are to be made economically, securely and without secondary ill effects. For this knowledge of the material which it works upon and which it aims to change into nobler and happier natures, education has recourse to physiology, psychology, sociology and all the other sciences of man, and to whatever facts concerning the production and prevention of changes in human nature educational experience itself has demonstrated. Nothing human should be alien to the student of education, though he will be specially interested in: -- first, the original nature of man, the tendencies which human beings have apart from all education, and second, the general laws of learning, the ways in which men's original tendencies are modified. He will also be more interested in man's intellectual and moral nature than in his physical or chemical nature, since the former is more amenable to education and changes in it are, as a rule, more valuable for human welfare. Many volumes larger than this would not suffice to report the knowledge of human nature that is relevant to education. The psychology of ...« less