personal inquiry. While the need for a background of direct experiences is great in elementary school, as children get older they should become increasingly able to carry out intellectual investigations without having to depend upon direct experiences. The principle of experiencing does apply, however, to the elementary phase of all subjects even when the learner is a high-school or college student or an adult. The purpose is to encourage in the learner a habitual attitude of establishing connections between the everyday life of human beings and the materials of formal instruction in a way that has meaning and application. The measuring and comparative grading of a student's assumed abilities, processes that reflect the educator's desire to assess the "results" of schooling, are incompatible with Dewey's thinking. The quantity of what is acquired does not in itself have anything to do with the development of mind. The "quality of mental process, not the production of correct answers," he wrote, "is the measure of educative growth." Because it is a process, learning is cumulative, and cannot be forced or rushed. For Dewey, the educative growth of the individual assures the healthy growth of a society. A society grows only by changes brought about by free individuals with independent intelligence and resourcefulness. The beginning of a better society, then, lies in the creation of better schools. At about the same time that a few pioneering schools of the 1920s were trying to put Dewey's theories into practice, the "testing" movement, which started in about 1910, was working up steam. The child had first become the object of methodical scientific research in 1897, when experiments conducted by Joseph M. Rice suggested that drill in spelling did not produce effective results. By 1913 Edward L. Thorndike had concluded that learning was the establishment of connections between a stimulus and a response and that the theory of mental faculties...
