Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
frequent of concrete examples,--the interest which things borrow from
their connection with our own personal welfare. The most natively
interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes.
We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the
fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing. Lend
the child his books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give them to
him, make them his own, and notice the new light with which they
instantly shine in his eyes. He takes a new kind of care of them
altogether. In mature life, all the drudgery of a man's business or
profession, intolerable in itself, is shot through with engrossing
significance because he knows it to be associated with his personal
fortunes. What more deadly uninteresting object can there be than a
railroad time-table? Yet where will you find a more interesting object
if you are going on a journey, and by its means can find your train? At
such times the time-table will absorb a man's entire attention, its
interest being borrowed solely from its relation to his personal life.
_From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract programme for
the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with
the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some
immediate connection with these_. The kindergarten methods, the
object-teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-training work,--all
recognize this feature. Schools in which these methods preponderate are
schools where discipline is easy, and where the voice of the master
claiming order and attention in threatening tones need never be heard.
_Next, step by step, connect with these first objects and experiences
the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill. Associate the new
with the old in some natural and telling way, so that the interest,
being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses the entire system
of objects of thought._
This is the abstract statement; and, abstractly, nothing can be easier
to understand. It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty
lies; for the difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher
consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able
to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dulness in
discovering such transitions which the other shows. One teacher's mind
will fairly coruscate with points of connection between the new lesson
and the circumstances of the children's other experience. Anecdotes and
reminiscences will abound in her talk; and the shuttle of interest will
shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a
lively and entertaining way. Another teacher has no such inventive
fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy thing. This is
the psychological meaning of the Herbartian principle of 'preparation'
for each lesson, and of correlating the new with the old. It is the
psychological meaning of that whole method of concentration in studies
of which you have been recently hearing so much. When the geography and
English and history and arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references
to one another, you get an interesting set of processes all along the
line.
* * * * *
If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only
one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something
in their minds _to attend with_, when you begin to talk. That something
can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting
in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects
which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of
a logically associated or systematic whole. Fortunately, almost any kind
of a connection is sufficient to carry the interest along. What a help
is our Philippine war at present in teaching geography! But before the
war you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and
where they supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if glass is a
stone, and, if not, why not; and then let them know how stones are
formed and glass manufactured. External links will serve as well as
those that are deeper and more logical. But interest, once shed upon a
subject, is liable to remain always with that subject. Our acquisitions
become in a measure portions of our personal self; and little by little,
as cross-associations multiply and habits of familiarity and practice
grow, the entire system of our objects of thought consolidates, most of
it becoming interesting for some purposes and in some degree.
An adult man's interests are almost every one of them intensely
artificial: they have slowly been built up. The objects of professional
interest are most of them, in their original nature, repulsive; but by
their connection with such natively exciting objects as one's personal
fortune, one's social responsibilities, and especially by the force of
inveterate habit, they grow to be the only things for which in middle
life a man profoundly cares.
But in all these the spread and consolidation have followed nothing but
the principles first laid down. If we could recall for a moment our
whole individual history, we should see that our professional ideals and
the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one
mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we
reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, some little
story told, some little object shown, some little operation witnessed,
brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by
associating it with some one of those primitively there. The interest
now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so
insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in
swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose
feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects
of our thinking,--they hang to each other by associated links, but the
_original_ source of interest in all of them is the native interest
which the earliest one once possessed.
XI. ATTENTION
Whoever treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for to say
that an object is interesting is only another way of saying that it
excites attention. But in addition to the attention which any object
already interesting or just becoming interesting claims--passive
attention or spontaneous attention, we may call it--there is a more
deliberate attention,--voluntary attention or attention with effort, as
it is called,--which we can give to objects less interesting or
uninteresting in themselves. The distinction between active and passive
attention is made in all books on psychology, and connects itself with
the deeper aspects of the topic. From our present purely practical point
of view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate; and passive
attention to natively interesting material requires no further
elucidation on this occasion. All that we need explicitly to note is
that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the
material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring
effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom
work goes on. I must say a few more words, however, about this latter
process of voluntary and deliberate attention.
One often hears it said that genius is nothing but a power of sustained
attention, and the popular impression probably prevails that men of
genius are remarkable for their voluntary powers in this direction. _But
a little introspective observation will show any one that voluntary
attention cannot be continuously sustained,--that it comes in beats._
When we are studying an uninteresting subject, if our mind tends to
wander, we have to bring back our attention every now and then by using
distinct pulses of effort, which revivify the topic for a moment, the
mind then running on for a certain number of seconds or minutes with
spontaneous interest, until again some intercurrent idea captures it and
takes it off. Then the processes of volitional recall must be repeated
once more. Voluntary attention, in short, is only a momentary affair.
The process, whatever it is, exhausts itself in the single act; and,
unless the matter is then taken in hand by some trace of interest
inherent in the subject, the mind fails to follow it at all. The
sustained attention of the genius, sticking to his subject for hours
together, is for the most part of the passive sort. The minds of
geniuses are full of copious and original associations. The subject of
thought, once started, develops all sorts of fascinating consequences.
The attention is led along one of these to another in the most
interesting manner, and the attention never once tends to stray away.
In a commonplace mind, on the other hand, a subject develops much less
numerous associates: it dies out then quickly; and, if the man is to
keep up thinking of it at all, he must bring his attention back to it by
a violent wrench. In him, therefore, the faculty of voluntary attention
receives abundant opportunity for cultivation in daily life. It is your
despised business man, your common man of affairs, (so looked down on by
the literary awarders of fame) whose virtue in this regard is likely to
be most developed; for he has to listen to the concerns of so many
uninteresting people, and to transact so much drudging detail, that the
faculty in question is always kept in training. A genius, on the
contrary, is the man in whom you are least likely to find the power of
attending to anything insipid or distasteful in itself. He breaks his
engagements, leaves his letters unanswered, neglects his family duties
incorrigibly, because he is powerless to turn his attention down and
back from those more interesting trains of imagery with which his genius
constantly occupies his mind.
Voluntary attention is thus an essentially instantaneous affair. You can
claim it, for your purposes in the schoolroom, by commanding it in loud,
imperious tones; and you can easily get it in this way. But, unless the
subject to which you thus recall their attention has inherent power to
interest the pupils, you will have got it for only a brief moment; and
their minds will soon be wandering again. To keep them where you have
called them, you must make the subject too interesting for them to
wander again. And for that there is one prescription; but the
prescription, like all our prescriptions, is abstract, and, to get
practical results from it, you must couple it with mother-wit.
The prescription is that _the subject must be made to show new aspects
of itself; to prompt new questions; in a word, to change_. From an
unchanging subject the attention inevitably wanders away. You can test
this by the simplest possible case of sensorial attention. Try to
attend steadfastly to a dot on the paper or on the wall. You presently
find that one or the other of two things has happened: either your field
of vision has become blurred, so that you now see nothing distinct at
all, or else you have involuntarily ceased to look at the dot in
question, and are looking at something else. But, if you ask yourself
successive questions about the dot,--how big it is, how far, of what
shape, what shade of color, etc.; in other words, if you turn it over,
if you think of it in various ways, and along with various kinds of
associates,--you can keep your mind on it for a comparatively long time.
This is what the genius does, in whose hands a given topic coruscates
and grows. And this is what the teacher must do for every topic if he
wishes to avoid too frequent appeals to voluntary attention of the