In a book intended for student teachers, the author aims to show how a knowledge of the nature of learning can give guidance to the act of teaching. Thyne restricts himself to a limited group of topics in order to establish a systematic relationship between the technique of teaching and the 'necessarily limited knowledge the student-teacher can be expected to acquire'.

After defining learning briefly as adopting a new response to a situation, Thyne offers a 'theory of learning' (differentiated only in an ambiguous fashion from the better-known learning theories) which we are to understand by its four requirements: cue, force (initiating a behavior), pilot cue, and tie. Thyne goes on to offer a poorly integrated mixture of Pavlovian conditioning and behavioristic theory to explain the various methods of learning through habit-formation, habit-breaking, and explanation. He even suggests and approves of the 'habit-breaking technique' for curing enuresis by the mattress-bell conditioned reflex warning system.