Page:John Dewey's Interest and Effort in Education (1913).djvu/71

 element of resistance to arouse his energies, especially his energies of thinking? Or is the work assigned so difficult that he has not the resources required in order to cope with it—so alien to his experience and his acquired habits that he does not know where or how to take hold? Between these two questions lies the teacher's task—for the teacher has a problem as well as the pupil. How shall the activities of pupils be progressively complicated by the introduction of difficulties, and yet these difficulties be of a nature to stimulate instead of dulling and merely discouraging? The judgment, the tact, the intellectual sympathy of instructors is taxed to the uttermost in answering these questions in the concrete with respect to the various subjects of study.

When an activity is too easy and simple, a person either engages in it because of the immediate pleasurable excitement it awakens, or he puts just enough of his powers upon it—their purely mechanical and physical side—to perform what is required in a perfunctory way, while he lets his mind wander to other things where