Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
That is, they need not rise before the mind in a marginal fringe or
context of concomitant circumstances, which mean for us their _date_.
They may be mere conceptions, floating pictures of an object, or of its
type or class. In this undated condition, we call them products of
'imagination' or 'conception.' Imagination is the term commonly used
where the object represented is thought of as an individual thing.
Conception is the term where we think of it as a type or class. For our
present purpose the distinction is not important; and I will permit
myself to use either the word 'conception,' or the still vaguer word
'idea,' to designate the inner objects of contemplation, whether these
be individual things, like 'the sun' or 'Julius Caesar,' or classes of
things, like 'animal kingdom,' or, finally, entirely abstract
attributes, like 'rationality' or 'rectitude.'
The result of our education is to fill the mind little by little, as
experiences accrete, with a stock of such ideas. In the illustration I
used at our first meeting, of the child snatching the toy and getting
slapped, the vestiges left by the first experience answered to so many
ideas which he acquired thereby,--ideas that remained with him
associated in a certain order, and from the last one of which the child
eventually proceeded to act. The sciences of grammar and of logic are
little more than attempts methodically to classify all such acquired
ideas and to trace certain laws of relationship among them. The forms of
relation between them, becoming themselves in turn noticed by the mind,
are treated as conceptions of a higher and more abstract order, as when
we speak of a syllogistic relation' between propositions, or of four
quantities making a 'proportion,' or of the 'inconsistency' of two
conceptions, or the 'implication' of one in the other.
So you see that the process of education, taken in a large way, may be
described as nothing but the process of acquiring ideas or conceptions,
the best educated mind being the mind which has the largest stock of
them, ready to meet the largest possible variety of the emergencies of
life. The lack of education means only the failure to have acquired
them, and the consequent liability to be 'floored' and 'rattled' in the
vicissitudes of experience.
In all this process of acquiring conceptions, a certain instinctive
order is followed. There is a native tendency to assimilate certain
kinds of conception at one age, and other kinds of conception at a later
age. During the first seven or eight years of childhood the mind is most
interested in the sensible properties of material things.
_Constructiveness_ is the instinct most active; and by the incessant
hammering and sawing, and dressing and undressing dolls, putting of
things together and taking them apart, the child not only trains the
muscles to co-ordinate action, but accumulates a store of physical
conceptions which are the basis of his knowledge of the material world
through life. Object-teaching and manual training wisely extend the
sphere of this order of acquisition. Clay, wood, metals, and the various
kinds of tools are made to contribute to the store. A youth brought up
with a sufficiently broad basis of this kind is always at home in the
world. He stands within the pale. He is acquainted with Nature, and
Nature in a certain sense is acquainted with him. Whereas the youth
brought up alone at home, with no acquaintance with anything but the
printed page, is always afflicted with a certain remoteness from the
material facts of life, and a correlative insecurity of consciousness
which make of him a kind of alien on the earth in which he ought to feel
himself perfectly at home.
I already said something of this in speaking of the constructive
impulse, and I must not repeat myself. Moreover, you fully realize, I am
sure, how important for life,--for the moral tone of life, quite apart
from definite practical pursuits,--is this sense of readiness for
emergencies which a man gains through early familiarity and acquaintance
with the world of material things. To have grown up on a farm, to have
haunted a carpenter's and blacksmith's shop, to have handled horses and
cows and boats and guns, and to have ideas and abilities connected with
such objects are an inestimable part of youthful acquisition. After
adolescence it is rare to be able to get into familiar touch with any of
these primitive things. The instinctive propensions have faded, and the
habits are hard to acquire.
Accordingly, one of the best fruits of the 'child-study' movement has
been to reinstate all these activities to their proper place in a sound
system of education. _Feed_ the growing human being, feed him with the
sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural
craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental
tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his
growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of
learning are books and verbally communicated information.
It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take
in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden similarities and
distinctions between things, and especially their causal sequences.
Rational knowledge of such things as mathematics, mechanics, chemistry,
and biology, is now possible; and the acquisition of conceptions of this
order form the next phase of education. Later still, not till
adolescence is well advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic
interest in abstract human relations--moral relations, properly so
called,--to sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions.
This general order of sequence is followed traditionally of course in
the schoolroom. It is foreign to my purpose to do more than indicate
that general psychological principle of the successive order of
awakening of the faculties on which the whole thing rests. I have spoken
of it already, apropos of the transitoriness of instincts. Just as many
a youth has to go permanently without an adequate stock of conceptions
of a certain order, because experiences of that order were not yielded
at the time when new curiosity was most acute, so it will conversely
happen that many another youth is spoiled for a certain subject of study
(although he would have enjoyed it well if led into it at a later age)
through having had it thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust was
created, and the bloom quite taken off from future trials. I think I
have seen college students unfitted forever for 'philosophy' from having
taken that study up a year too soon.
In all these later studies, verbal material is the vehicle by which the
mind thinks. The abstract conceptions of physics and sociology may, it
is true, be embodied in visual or other images of phenomena, but they
need not be so; and the truth remains that, after adolescence has begun,
"words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always
larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn. This
is so even in the natural sciences, so far as these are causal and
rational, and not merely confined to description. So I go back to what I
said awhile ago apropos of verbal memorizing. The more accurately words
are learned, the better, if only the teacher make sure that what they
signify is also understood. It is the failure of this latter condition,
in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, that has caused that
reaction against 'parrot-like reproduction' that we are so familiar with
to-day. A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to examine a
young class in geography. Glancing, at the book, she said: "Suppose you
should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you
find it at the bottom,--warmer or colder than on top?" None of the class
replying, the teacher said: "I'm sure they know, but I think you don't
ask the question quite rightly. Let me try." So, taking the book, she
asked: "In what condition is the interior of the globe?" and received
the immediate answer from half the class at once: "The interior of the
globe is in a condition of _igneous fusion_." Better exclusive
object-teaching than such verbal recitations as that; and yet verbal
reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective work, must
always play a leading, and surely _the_ leading, part in education. Our
modern reformers, in their books, write too exclusively of the earliest
years of the pupil. These lend themselves better to explicit treatment;
and I myself, in dwelling so much upon the native impulses, and
object-teaching, and anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to
the line of least resistance in describing. Yet away back in childhood
we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the
intelligence of abstract terms. The object-teaching is mainly to
_launch_ the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts
concerned, upon the more abstract ideas.
To hear some authorities on teaching, however, you would suppose that
geography not only began, but ended with the school-yard and neighboring
hill, that physics was one endless round of repeating the same sort of
tedious weighing and measuring operation: whereas a very few examples
are usually sufficient to set the imagination free on genuine lines, and
then what the mind craves is more rapid, general, and abstract
treatment. I heard a lady say that she had taken her child to the
kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he saw through it immediately."
Too many school children 'see' as immediately 'through' the namby-pamby
attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make
them interesting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of
the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite
to think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies are the
only kind of things their minds can digest.
But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in the last
resort, the teacher's own tact is the only thing that can bring out the
right effect. The great difficulty with abstractions is that of knowing
just what meaning the pupil attaches to the terms he uses. The words may
sound all right, but the meaning remains the child's own secret. So
varied forms of words must be insisted on, to bring the secret out. And
a strange secret does it often prove. A relative of mine was trying to
explain to a little girl what was meant by 'the passive voice': "Suppose
that you kill me: you who do the killing are in the active voice, and I,
who am killed, am in the passive voice." "But how can you speak if
you're killed?" said the child. "Oh, well, you may suppose that I am
not yet quite dead!" The next day the child was asked, in class, to
explain the passive voice, and said, "It's the kind of voice you speak
with when you ain't quite dead."
In such a case as this the illustration ought to have been more varied.
Every one's memory will probably furnish examples of the fantastic
meaning which their childhood attached to certain verbal statements (in
poetry often), and which their elders, not having any reason to suspect,
never corrected. I remember being greatly moved emotionally at the age
of eight by the ballad of Lord Ullin's Daughter. Yet I thought that the
staining of the heather by the blood was the evil chiefly dreaded, and
that, when the boatman said,
"I'll row you o'er the ferry.
It is not for your silver bright,
But for your winsome lady,"
he was to receive the lady for his pay. Similarly, I recently found that
one of my own children was reading (and accepting) a verse of Tennyson's
In Memoriam as
"Ring out the _food_ of rich and poor,
Ring in _redness_ to all mankind,"
and finding no inward difficulty.