Excerpt from The Organization of Instruction Materials: With Special Relation to the Elementary School Curriculum For a number of years the writer has been engaged in training teachers for elementary and secondary schools. During this time he has had excellent opportunities to observe the struggle of beginning teachers in their attempts to interpret courses of study. He has frequently had occasion to listen to expressions of discouragement from teachers of experience, both trained and untrained, who were attempting to follow courses of study that failed to give a clear statement of the subject matter to be taught and the method of teaching it. Often he has found such teachers to have recourse to courses of study of other systems in spite of the fact that the fundamental plan of such courses might not be in harmony with that of the system to which it was being adapted. The present study is an attempt to show how such courses of study may be made of greater service to teachers in their task of making instruction materials meaningful, of bringing about organization of knowledge on part of children. The assumptions in the discussion of this problem are as follows, (1) The course of study of a school system is a plan of action for the teachers of the system; it must therefore indicate clearly what is to be taught and how such materials are to be made real experiences on part of children. (2) The object of teaching must be the organization of experiences by children with a view of making them available for further use and, for this reason, helps given teachers on "how to teach" must concern themselves largely with the problem of how children's experiences are to become organized. I am greatly indebted to Professor Frank M. McMurry for helpful suggestions and criticisms in making the study; to the works of Professors Dewey and I. E. Miller for a statement of the psychology of thinking; to Dr. William H. Kilpatrick for suggesting the final arrangement of chapters; to the critic teachers of the William McGuffey School of Miami University for supplying some of the illustrations of children's organizations of the third chapter and for trying out the concrete plans of the fifth chapter. The bibliography indicates those books most frequently used in connection with the various phases of the discussion. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.