such as breathing, crying, digestion. The pathways for complex acts,
such as speaking English or French, or writing, are not formed at birth
but must be built up within the life-time of the individual. It is the
process of building them up that we call education. This process is a
physical feat involving the production of changes in physical material
in the brain. Study involves the overcoming of resistance in the
nervous system. That is why it is so hard. In your early school-days,
when you set about laboriously learning the multiplication table, your
unwilling protests were wrung because you were being compelled to force
the nervous current through new pathways, and to overcome the inertia
of physical matter. Today, when you begin a train of reasoning, the
task is difficult because you are opening hitherto untravelled
pathways. There is a comforting thought, however, which is derived from
the factor of modifiability, in that with each succeeding repetition,
the task becomes easier, because the path becomes worn smoothly and the
nervous current seeks it of its own accord; in other words, each act
and each thought tends to become habitualized. Education is then a
process of forming habits, and the rest of the book will be devoted to
the description and discussion of habits which a student should form.

READING AND EXERCISE

Reading: Herrick (7)

Exercise 1. Draw a picture of the brain, showing roughly what takes
place there (a) when you read a book, (6) listen to a lecture, (c) take
notes.