12

3, The material selected should be well balanced, and should be
used only when justified by results. The law of diminishing returns applies
to the use of any teaching device as well as in economic fields. For ex-
ample, if twenty per cent of the time spent on dancing gives what the
instructor would think of as a fifty per cent result, and thirty por cent

of time spent would give a seventy-five per cent result, the extra ten por ¢ ©

cent would be justified. If a further increase of time to forty per

cent gives an increase in result of only five per cent, this last ten per-
cent is not justified by the results. Hence we need scientific, controlled
experimentation to determine just how much time should be spent at each
stage of the curriculum on each type of activity, in order to cause the
curriculum to give a maximum return for the time spent. At the risk of
repetition, it should be again stated that every part of every curriculum
must pay its waye

4, The teaching material should be selected with a view to futuro re~
sults, not just to the present “unfolding” of the child, It is a current
conception in certain schools of educational philosophy that the "life"
of the child at the time he is being taught is the most important thing
and that this should guide the main thought of the educator, There is no
doubt that the child's interests and efforts will be concerned practically
altogether with activities that are of immediate concern to him, and that
the educator must keep this in mind in the planning of a curriculum;
put on the other hand, the physical educator must be looking ahead to the
final result, and must plan a curriculum that will lead to that result,
while at the same time being in many places disguised as to form, su gar~
coated by presenting it as a simple game or contest, when ideally more pro~
gress could be made if there could be direct coaching in technique. It
has been our experience that where the objective was clear enough in the
pupil's mind, and was an objective which he felt was worthwhile, that
much direct coaching in technique could be very easily motivated.

5, Fundamental activities should be stressed out of all apparent
proportion to their direct values. To illustrate, it has been found
that with a group of fifty Chinese students of physical edueation, who
had had at least one and two-third years of careful training in the tech-
nique of track and field and athletic game activities, the correlation
between records in four track and field events and skill (not “value to the
team" which may be largely courage and fighting ability, coupled with
fast thinking and experience) in basketball and soccer football ran from
075 to .98 according to the method of judging the skills. The average of
correlations of able judges who knew the men well, and who rated them first
by the Scott Rating Scale method, and then checked it by ranking then,
was .86. This would indicate that these activities had enough elements
in common with athletic games to jw tify their inclusion in a training
scheme far out of proportion to their obvious educational value.

CRITERIA OF TEACHING FOR PHYSICAL -
EDUCATION

The material given here presents nothing new to the philosophy’ of
education, being merely a re-statement of some of the important principles
of the psychology of education. It is given here because of its general
neglect in physical education and because the writer desires to give a
rounded picture of the whole problem.