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This is a report to the American Council of Education by a committee of persons competent in various fields related to education, appointed by that board in 1934 to investigate whether the rôle of emotion in education had been too severely neglected and in the event that it should appear desirable for education to concern itself more directly with the development and direction of emotion, to consider by what devices emotions may be more accurately described, measured and oriented.
Their findings show: that no consideration has been given to the role of affective factors in the educative process; that a great deal of experimental material describing the nature of the affective processes exists but that the implications of this material for education or for child rearing have not been determined experimentally; that basic ignorance of the influence of affective factors on learning still exists even among psychologists (we note that psychoanalytic literature has been neglected); that such insights as have been secured into the influences of emotion on personality development have not been assimilated into school practice; that the role of affective experience in developing esthetic appreciation or in nourishing those constructive motives upon which good citizenship depends has only been superficially probed by experiments; that there are many hypotheses held as to what emotional maturity is but that scientific knowledge about the question is very limited.
Although experimental validation of the implications for education of contemporary knowledge about the affective processes has yet to be accomplished the committee feels strongly that affective factors must be considered. “For if the scholar, concerned with the primary business of knowledge fails to deal with the whole man, particularly with the control of passion and the guidance of desire, he may properly be charged with contributory negligence when the democracy becomes either a mob or a regimented army, when freedom