ABSTRACT
All these arguments have the important consequence of giving a sound and genuinely scientific meaning to the heretofore wholly diffuse concept of mental nourishment. For generations actually, since the Greeks – there has been an emphasis on 'training the mind', 'exercising the intellect', because of a concept of mind as virtual muscle. It was widely said that struggling in school with problems gives one the ability later on to struggle in reality better with other real but related problems, and so forth. Probably this idea reached its zenith during the late nineteenth century in American and European pedagogy, where the ideas of the importance of drill and repetition in reading, writing, and arithmetic were developed as ways to prepare the child for the real world. Sparing rods and loosening discipline spoiled the child, and so all 'progressive' Rousseauistic education was anathema. And there is a kernel of truth in those old ideas.
