employed; further repetitions of the act require less and less conscious
effort until at length it will be performed almost with the same sureness
and ease with which reflex or automatic movements take place. Any activity
whatsoever when reduced to this automatic stage is termed habit.

The importance of habit in the development of the child can scarcely be
over-estimated; in truth, it is the one great process which dominates
nine-tenths of all the activity of the individual throughout his entire
life. Habits ought to be our most helpful and reliable servants, but they
are too often enemies that bind us hand and foot and prevent the
realization of our highest possibilities.

Much of the training and education of the child consists, therefore, in
acquiring a series of useful habits and in inhibiting acts that might
result in habits that are undesirable. A child left to himself or
improperly reared will acquire all sorts of undesirable habits which may
have the effect of hampering his every movement and which may cause
eventually his disgrace and failure in life. Even the adult who fails to
practice the details of the various activities connected with his vocation
until they result in effective habits of work will usually fail, while the
man who has mastered the details of his occupation through reducing them to
a series of effective habits will surely succeed. Note the ease and
perfection with which the skilled workman performs his labor and compare
it with the slow, slovenly work of the unskilled laborer.

One important development of the future will be the employment of an expert
in each occupation whose business it will be to teach the workmen the most
efficient and economical way of doing his particular work. Even now in many
factories high-priced experts are secured whose duty it is to teach the
workmen how to eliminate all unnecessary movements in their work and how to