Transfer of Training and Reconstruction of Experience

Abstract

Transfer of training, like democracy, intelligence, learning, curriculum, and the like, has been defined in a variety of ways. Without taking much space to review these definitions it is safe to say that all of them agree on one general pattern. Thus we may define transfer of training a that proces of using or applying previously acquired information, habit, skill, attitude, or ideal in dealing with a relatively new or novel situation. So defined transfer of training is a fact which both experience and experiment have amply demonstrated, Thorndike to the contrary notwithstanding. That it is also an ideal we have no reason to doubt so long as we have faith in education and so long further as we subscribe to the view that experience, properly acquired and used, is the best teacher. That it is intimately tied up with our concept of democracy cannot be ignored once we agree that democracy, from one view point, is a faith in the average man's ability to use and modify his experience in order to direct the course of his subsequent behavior. Thus, denial of transfer of training means denial of the verdict of experience, of the efficacy of education, and of the soundness and validity of democracy as a guiding ideal. Furthermore, to deny transfer is equivalent to denying to man that quality called intelligence, which separates him from the non-living and the lower forms of life. In final analysis, education, learning, democracy, and the like terms, all haYe their root on the assumption that transfer of training is a fact.