| Summary: | "During the past twenty-five years it has been my privilege to travel widely throughout the United States, visiting and working in the schools of more than one-third of our states. On the basis of this cumulative experience I must affirm at the outset that public schools in the United States are now better places for children to learn than they ever have been. It is equally important to affirm that our present schools also can be improved tremendously. This can be accomplished by applying to the educative process the knowledge that scientific research has uncovered about the causative factors that influence human learning, development, behavior, and adjustment. Certainly education today still has its share of "unexplained perplexities" and its share of unanticipated failures. The fact that one person out of every ten who goes through our schools will eventually be hospitalized because of mental and emotional breakdown, as reported by the National Institute of Mental Health, indicates that we do not understand adequately how to develop emotionally healthy persons. The current crop of badly confused young persons and of juvenile delinquents points to an equal lack of understanding of how to produce socially adjusted and dedicated persons. Of course it would not be fair to blame all of these failures on the schools alone. Yet we cannot deny that schools have had the opportunity to help these unfortunate individuals. We simply have not been perceptive enough to distinguish the nature of their needs, flexible enough to adapt the educative process to individual differences, and inventive enough to find ways of evoking interest and building learning goals that could become real to these persons. The sciences that study human learning, behavior, and adjustment have now pushed their research far enough to explain some of our current failures and so to make possible a considerable improvement in the educative process. But this can come about only if we school people acquaint ourselves with these findings, analyze the causes of our hitherto "unexplained perplexities," and then conscientiously experiment through time with new ways of working with children in the classroom. This paper is an attempt to make a small contribution in this direction. It will describe the factors which research has shown to be causative in human learning and development. It will state some generalizations about the educative process that seem to be implied by these research findings. And it will illustrate ways in which a teacher can work with a child, already emotionally disturbed by inappropriate educational methods, plus other factors, to re-activate his confidence in himself and his own inner dynamic to learn and develop"--Create. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved).
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