Finally, skill in adjusting behavior to knowledge is one of the most necessary abilities and most difficult to attain. The study of animal behavior experimentally is at the foundation of much that we know of human psychology and the grounds of human behavior. Even in an elementary class it is quite possible so to study animal responses and the results of response as to give guidance and facility to the individual in interpreting the efficiency of his own responses, and in adding to his own controls. As has been said, practice of some kind is necessary to determine whether our estimate of values is good. Even vicarious experience has educative value.
C. HABITS WHICH MAY BE STRENGTHENED BY THE WORK IN BIOLOGY
Habits are of course the normal outcome of repeated action. Indeed, skills are in a sense habits from another point of view. Skill, however, looks rather toward the output; habit, toward the mode of functioning by the person by whom the result is attained. We may then develop habits in respect to all the processes and activities mentioned above under the term "skills." The teacher of biology should have definitely in purpose the securing for the student of habits of inquiry, of diligence, of concentration, of accuracy of observation, of seeking and weighing evidence, of detecting the essentials in a mass of facts, of refusing to rest satisfied until a conclusion, the most tenable in the light of all known data, is reached, and of reëxamining conclusions whenever new evidence is offered.
Of course it is impossible to use biology to get habits of right reasoning in students unless we _really allow them to reason_. If we insist that their work is merely to observe, record, and hold in memory,--as so many of us do in laboratory work,--they may form habits of doing these things, but not necessarily any more than this. Indeed, they may definitely form the habit of doing _only_ these things, _failing to use the results in forming for themselves any of the larger conclusions about organisms_. _Seeing_ and _knowing_--without the ability and habit of _thinking_--is not an uncommon or surprising result of our conventional laboratory work. There is only one way to get the habit of right "following through" in reasoning; this is, _always to do the thing_. When data are observed or are furnished it is a pedagogical sin on the part of the teacher to allow the student to stop at that point; and equally so to deduce the conclusion for the student, or to allow the writer of the textbook to do so, or at any time to induce the student to accept from another a conclusion which he himself might reach from the data. We have depended too much on our science as a mere observational science,--when as a matter of fact its chief glory is really its opportunity and its incentives to coherent thinking and careful testing of conclusions.