Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
with things we care for; and the child who stands at the bottom of the
scale thus experimentally established might, by dint of the strength of
his passion for a subject, and in consequence of the logical association
into which he weaves the actual materials of his experience, be a very
effective memorizer indeed, and do his school-tasks on the whole much
better than an immediate parrot who might stand at the top of the
'scientifically accurate' list.
This preponderance of interest, of passion, in determining the results
of a human being's working life, obtains throughout. No elementary
measurement, capable of being performed in a laboratory, can throw any
light on the actual efficiency of the subject; for the vital thing about
him, his emotional and moral energy and doggedness, can be measured by
no single experiment, and becomes known only by the total results in the
long run. A blind man like Huber, with his passion for bees and ants,
can observe them through other people's eyes better than these can
through their own. A man born with neither arms nor legs, like the late
Kavanagh, M.P.--and what an icy heart his mother must have had about him
in his babyhood, and how 'negative' would the laboratory-measurements of
his motor-functions have been!--can be an adventurous traveller, an
equestrian and sportsman, and lead an athletic outdoor life. Mr. Romanes
studied the elementary rate of apperception in a large number of persons
by making them read a paragraph as fast as they could take it in, and
then immediately write down all they could reproduce of its contents. He
found astonishing differences in the rapidity, some taking four times as
long as others to absorb the paragraph, and the swiftest readers being,
as a rule, the best immediate recollectors, too. But not,--and this is
my point,--_not_ the most _intellectually capable subjects_, as tested
by the results of what Mr. Romanes rightly names 'genuine' intellectual
work; for he tried the experiment with several highly distinguished men
in science and literature, and most of them turned out to be slow
readers.
In the light of all such facts one may well believe that the total
impression which a perceptive teacher will get of the pupil's condition,
as indicated by his general temper and manner, by the listlessness or
alertness, by the ease or painfulness with which his school work is
done, will be of much more value than those unreal experimental tests,
those pedantic elementary measurements of fatigue, memory, association,
and attention, etc., which are urged upon us as the only basis of a
genuinely scientific pedagogy. Such measurements can give us useful
information only when we combine them with observations made without
brass instruments, upon the total demeanor of the measured individual,
by teachers with eyes in their heads and common sense, and some feeling
for the concrete facts of human nature in their hearts.
Depend upon it, no one need be too much cast down by the discovery of
his deficiency in any elementary faculty of the mind. What tells in life
is the whole mind working together, and the deficiencies of any one
faculty can be compensated by the efforts of the rest. You can be an
artist without visual images, a reader without eyes, a mass of erudition
with a bad elementary memory. In almost any subject your passion for the
subject will save you. If you only care enough for a result, you will
almost certainly attain it. If you wish to be rich, you will be rich; if
you wish to be learned, you will be learned; if you wish to be good, you
will be good. Only you must, then, _really_ wish these things, and wish
them with exclusiveness, and not wish at the same time a hundred other
incompatible things just as strongly.
One of the most important discoveries of the 'scientific' sort that have
recently been made in psychology is that of Mr. Galton and others
concerning the great variations among individuals in the type of their
imagination. Every one is now familiar with the fact that human beings
vary enormously in the brilliancy, completeness, definiteness, and
extent of their visual images. These are singularly perfect in a large
number of individuals, and in a few are so rudimentary as hardly to
exist. The same is true of the auditory and motor images, and probably
of those of every kind; and the recent discovery of distinct brain-areas
for the various orders of sensation would seem to provide a physical
basis for such variations and discrepancies. The facts, as I said, are
nowadays so popularly known that I need only remind you of their
existence. They might seem at first sight of practical importance to the
teacher; and, indeed, teachers have been recommended to sort their
pupils in this way, and treat them as the result falls out. You should
interrogate them as to their imagery, it is said, or exhibit lists of
written words to their eyes, and then sound similar lists in their ears,
and see by which channel a child retains most words. Then, in dealing
with that child, make your appeals predominantly through that channel.
If the class were very small, results of some distinctness might
doubtless thus be obtained by a painstaking teacher. But it is obvious
that in the usual schoolroom no such differentiation of appeal is
possible; and the only really useful practical lesson that emerges from
this analytic psychology in the conduct of large schools is the lesson
already reached in a purely empirical way, that the teacher ought
always to impress the class through as many sensible channels as he can.
Talk and write and draw on blackboard, permit the pupils to talk, and
make them write and draw, exhibit pictures, plans, and curves, have your
diagrams colored differently in their different parts, etc.; and out of
the whole variety of impressions the individual child will find the most
lasting ones for himself. In all primary school work this principle of
multiple impressions is well recognized, so I need say no more about it
here.
This principle of multiplying channels and varying associations and
appeals is important, not only for teaching pupils to remember, but for
teaching them to understand. It runs, in fact, through the whole
teaching art.
One word about the unconscious and unreproducible part of our
acquisitions, and I shall have done with the topic of memory.
Professor Ebbinghaus, in a heroic little investigation into the laws of
memory which he performed a dozen or more years ago by the method of
learning lists of nonsense syllables, devised a method of measuring the
rate of our forgetfulness, which lays bare an important law of the mind.
His method was to read over his list until he could repeat it once by
heart unhesitatingly. The number of repetitions required for this was a
measure of the difficulty of the learning in each particular case. Now,
after having once learned a piece in this way, if we wait five minutes,
we find it impossible to repeat it again in the same unhesitating
manner. We must read it over again to revive some of the syllables,
which have already dropped out or got transposed. Ebbinghaus now
systematically studied the number of readings-over which were necessary
to revive the unhesitating recollection of the piece after five minutes,
half an hour, an hour, a day, a week, a month, had elapsed. The number
of rereadings required he took to be a measure of the _amount of
forgetting_ that had occurred in the elapsed interval. And he found some
remarkable facts. The process of forgetting, namely, is vastly more
rapid at first than later on. Thus full half of the piece seems to be
forgotten within the first half-hour, two-thirds of it are forgotten at
the end of eight hours, but only four-fifths at the end of a month. He
made no trials beyond one month of interval; but, if we ourselves
prolong ideally the curve of remembrance, whose beginning his
experiments thus obtain, it is natural to suppose that, no matter how
long a time might elapse, the curve would never descend quite so low as
to touch the zero-line. In other words, no matter how long ago we may
have learned a poem, and no matter how complete our inability to
reproduce it now may be, yet the first learning will still show its
lingering effects in the abridgment of the time required for learning it
again. In short, Professor Ebbinghaus's experiments show that things
which we are quite unable definitely to recall have nevertheless
impressed themselves, in some way, upon the structure of the mind. We
are different for having once learned them. The resistances in our
systems of brain-paths are altered. Our apprehensions are quickened. Our
conclusions from certain premises are probably not just what they would
be if those modifications were not there. The latter influence the whole
margin of our consciousness, even though their products, not being
distinctly reproducible, do not directly figure at the focus of the
field.
The teacher should draw a lesson from these facts. We are all too apt to
measure the gains of our pupils by their proficiency in directly
reproducing in a recitation or an examination such matters as they may
have learned, and inarticulate power in them is something of which we
always underestimate the value. The boy who tells us, "I know the
answer, but I can't say what it is," we treat as practically identical
with him who knows absolutely nothing about the answer at all. But this
is a great mistake. It is but a small part of our experience in life
that we are ever able articulately to recall. And yet the whole of it
has had its influence in shaping our character and defining our
tendencies to judge and act. Although the ready memory is a great
blessing to its possessor, the vaguer memory of a subject, of having
once had to do with it, of its neighborhood, and of where we may go to
recover it again, constitutes in most men and women the chief fruit of
their education. This is true even in professional education. The
doctor, the lawyer, are seldom able to decide upon a case off-hand. They
differ from other men only through the fact that they know how to get at
the materials for decision in five minutes or half an hour: whereas the
layman is unable to get at the materials at all, not knowing in what
books and indexes to look or not understanding the technical terms.
Be patient, then, and sympathetic with the type of mind that cuts a
poor figure in examinations. It may, in the long examination which life
sets us, come out in the end in better shape than the glib and ready
reproducer, its passions being deeper, its purposes more worthy, its
combining power less commonplace, and its total mental output
consequently more important.
Such are the chief points which it has seemed worth while for me to call
to your notice under the head of memory. We can sum them up for
practical purposes by saying that the art of remembering is the art of
_thinking_; and by adding, with Dr. Pick, that, when we wish to fix a
new thing in either our own mind or a pupil's, our conscious effort
should not be so much to _impress_ and _retain_ it as to _connect_ it
with something else already there. The connecting _is_ the thinking;
and, if we attend clearly to the connection, the connected thing will
certainly be likely to remain within recall.
I shall next ask you to consider the process by which we acquire new
knowledge,--the process of 'Apperception,' as it is called, by which we
receive and deal with new experiences, and revise our stock of ideas so
as to form new or improved conceptions.
XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS
The images of our past experiences, of whatever nature they may be,
visual or verbal, blurred and dim, vivid and distinct, abstract or
concrete, need not be memory images, in the strict sense of the word.