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Role of the Instructor

If we return to our observation of the child, I think we will find that imagination is the prevailing organization, and in the man of genius also, whether poet or scientist, there is just this ability to make new, free associations. The wise teacher, then, will be a person who, instead of doling out objective truths with one hand and with the other receiving back from the pupil the same idea stamped with the pupil's brain trade mark, shall rather be an interesting personality, a psychical and moral object in the pupil's environment from which the pupil can enlarge his own subjective experience. He is not to dictate the conditions of learning, but be on hand to supply the ideas which will be food for the already interesting ideas of the child, or even to help the child find his own interesting ideas. He must serve as the model for the 'trying on,' as Dickens's dolls' dressmaker, Jenny Wren, would say, of halfsubjective, half-objective ideas; and he must be on hand to help in the organization from the loose structure of the imagination up through inductive reasoning to the compact form of deductive reasoning. (Boggs, 1907)
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