their environment. But in the human race it is one of the chief factors
in adjustment to environment. Imitation is one of the main factors in
education. Usually the quickest way to teach a child to do a thing is to
show him how.

Through imitation we acquire our language, manners, and customs. Ideals,
beliefs, prejudices, attitudes, we take on through imitation. The
tendency to imitate others coupled with the desire to be thought well of
by others is one of the most powerful factors in producing conformity.
They are the whips which keep us within the bounds of custom and
conventionality. The tendency to imitate is so strong that its results
are almost as certain as are those of inherited tendencies. It is almost
as certain that a child will be like his parents in speech, manners,
customs, superstitions, etc., as it is that he will be like them in form
of body. He not only walks and talks and acts like his parents, but he
thinks as they do. We, therefore, have the term _social heredity_,
meaning the taking on of all sorts of social habits and ideals through
imitation.

The part that imitation plays in the education of a child may be learned
by going to a country home and noting how the boy learns to do all the
many things about the farm by imitating his father, and how the girl
learns to do all the housework by imitating her mother. Imitation is the
basis of much of the play of children, in that their play consists in
large part of doing what they see older people doing. This imitative
play gives them skill and is a large factor in preparing for the work of
life.

=Dramatization.= Dramatization is an aspect of imitation, and is a means
of making ideas more real than they would otherwise be. There is nothing