If the vision of the learner in the initial period was predominantly as an empty organism and in the next as an active organism, in the period that followed it was as a social organism. The beliefs regarding the nature of the learner in the first period drew heavily from the associationist view of the human being, in the second from the Gestalt and personalistic views; later they also drew from the emerging social psychological and group dynamic views.
The child as learner as envisioned as a social organism, and learning was perceived as occurring through interpersonal actions and reactions, each person in the classroom serving as a stimulus for every other person. It is hard to overemphasize the impact on the classroom of the "group climate" concepts and studies by Lewin and his associates beginning in the late 1930s, which were given added cogency by the ideological issues of World War II. Innumerable treatises, textbooks, and programs applied these ideas and findings to the classroom, and such terms as "authoritarian", "democratic", and "laissez-faire" became, for good or ill, integral parts of the educational vocabulary. Experimenters in the learning laboratory became concerned with such previously unheard-of matters as "interpersonal cohesion" and "small group processes", and teachers in the classroom with "sociometric structure" and "group dynamics".
Concomitant changes in the image of the ideal classroom could again be observed. If the child is primarily a social organism, then the objectives of his education should be primarily social in character. And if learning is a social or group process, then a circular or group-centred classroom where everyone faces everyone else (as once they had been forced to face only the teacher) is the most sensible and practical, even necessary, learning environment. And this indeed became a favourite image of the classroom.
The first vision of the child as a learner was:
