close of the lesson, is the fact that he is himself aware of its lack.
In school the child soon discovers that in a lesson he selects and gives
attention to various ideas solely in order to gain control over some
problem which he may more or less definitely conceive in advance. For
this reason, if the teacher attempts, as in the above examples, to fix
the child's attention on certain facts without any conception of
purpose, the pupil nevertheless usually asks himself the question: "What
does the teacher intend me to do with these facts?" Indeed, without at
least that motive to hold such disconnected ideas in his mind, it is
doubtful whether the pupil would attend to them sufficiently to organize
them into a new item of knowledge. When, therefore, the teacher proposes
at the outset an attractive problem to solve, he has gone a long way
toward stimulating the intellectual activity of the pupil. The setting
of problems, the supplying of motives, the giving of aims, the awakening
of needs--this constitutes a large part of the business of the teacher.


PUPIL'S MOTIVE

=Pupil's Problem versus Teacher's.=--But it is important that the
problem before the pupil at the beginning of the lesson should really be
the pupil's and not the teacher's merely. The teacher should be careful
not to impose the problem on the pupils in an arbitrary way, but should
try to connect the lesson with an interest that is already active. The
teacher's motive in teaching the lesson and the pupil's motive in
attending to it are usually quite different. The teacher's problem
should, of course, be identical with the real problem of the lesson.
Thus in a literature lesson on "Hide and Seek" (_Ontario Third Reader_),
the teacher's motive would be to lead the pupil to appreciate the music
of the lines, the beauty of the images, and the pathos of the ideas; and