Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/24

 If the task appeals to him merely as a task, it is as certain psychologically, as is the law of action and reaction physically, that the child is simply engaged in acquiring the habit of divided attention; that he is getting the ability to direct eye and ear, lips and mouth, to what is present before him so as to impress those things upon his memory, while at the same time he is setting his thoughts free to work upon matters of real interest to him.

No account of the educative training actually secured is adequate unless it recognizes the division of attention into which the child is being educated, and faces the question of what the worth of such a division may be. External mechanical attention to a task as a task is inevitably accompanied by random mind-wandering along the lines of the pleasurable.

The spontaneous power of the child, his demand for realization of his own impulses, cannot be suppressed. If the external conditions are such that the child cannot put his activity into the work to be done, he learns, in a most miraculous way, the exact amount of attention that has