Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense
to suppose that every step in education _can_ be interesting. The
fighting impulse must often be appealed to. Make the pupil feel ashamed
of being scared at fractions, of being 'downed' by the law of falling
bodies; rouse his pugnacity and pride, and he will rush at the difficult
places with a sort of inner wrath at himself that is one of his best
moral faculties. A victory scored under such conditions becomes a
turning-point and crisis of his character. It represents the high-water
mark of his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pattern for his
self-imitation. The teacher who never rouses this sort of pugnacious
excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best forms of
usefulness.
The next instinct which I shall mention is that of _Ownership_, also one
of the radical endowments of the race. It often is the antagonist of
imitation. Whether social progress is due more to the passion for
keeping old things and habits or to the passion of imitating and
acquiring new ones may in some cases be a difficult thing to decide. The
sense of ownership begins in the second year of life. Among the first
words which an infant learns to utter are the words 'my' and 'mine,'
and woe to the parents of twins who fail to provide their gifts in
duplicate. The depth and primitiveness of this instinct would seem to
cast a sort of psychological discredit in advance upon all radical forms
of communistic utopia. Private proprietorship cannot be practically
abolished until human nature is changed. It seems essential to mental
health that the individual should have something beyond the bare clothes
on his back to which he can assert exclusive possession, and which he
may defend adversely against the world. Even those religious orders who
make the most stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary to relax
the rule a little in favor of the human heart made unhappy by reduction
to too disinterested terms. The monk must have his books: the nun must
have her little garden, and the images and pictures in her room.
In education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental, and can be
appealed to in many ways. In the house, training in order and neatness
begins with the arrangement of the child's own personal possessions. In
the school, ownership is particularly important in connection with one
of its special forms of activity, the collecting impulse. An object
possibly not very interesting in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp,
or a single map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills a gap
in a collection or helps to complete a series. Much of the scholarly
work of the world, so far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and
erudition (and this lies at the basis of all our human scholarship),
would seem to owe its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies
the accumulating and collecting instinct than to any special appeal
which it makes to our cravings after rationality. A man wishes a
complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a subject
than anybody else, much as another may wish to own more dollars or more
early editions or more engravings before the letter than anybody else.
The teacher who can work this impulse into the school tasks is
fortunate. Almost all children collect something. A tactful teacher may
get them to take pleasure in collecting books; in keeping a neat and
orderly collection of notes; in starting, when they are mature enough, a
card catalogue; in preserving every drawing or map which they may make.
Neatness, order, and method are thus instinctively gained, along with
the other benefits which the possession of the collection entails. Even
such a noisome thing as a collection of postage stamps may be used by
the teacher as an inciter of interest in the geographical and historical
information which she desires to impart. Sloyd successfully avails
itself of this instinct in causing the pupil to make a collection of
wooden implements fit for his own private use at home. Collecting is, of
course, the basis of all natural history study; and probably nobody ever
became a good naturalist who was not an unusually active collector when
a boy.
_Constructiveness_ is another great instinctive tendency with which the
schoolroom has to contract an alliance. Up to the eighth or ninth year
of childhood one may say that the child does hardly anything else than
handle objects, explore things with his hands, doing and undoing,
setting up and knocking down, putting together and pulling apart; for,
from the psychological point of view, construction and destruction are
two names for the same manual activity. Both signify the production of
change, and the working of effects, in outward things. The result of all
this is that intimate familiarity with the physical environment, that
acquaintance with the properties of material things, which is really
the foundation of human _consciousness_. To the very last, in most of
us, the conceptions of objects and their properties are limited to the
notion of what we can _do with them_. A 'stick' means something we can
lean upon or strike with; 'fire,' something to cook, or warm ourselves,
or burn things up withal; 'string,' something with which to tie things
together. For most people these objects have no other meaning. In
geometry, the cylinder, circle, sphere, are defined as what you get by
going through certain processes of construction, revolving a
parallelogram upon one of its sides, etc. The more different kinds of
things a child thus gets to know by treating and handling them, the more
confident grows his sense of kinship with the world in which he lives.
An unsympathetic adult will wonder at the fascinated hours which a child
will spend in putting his blocks together and rearranging them. But the
wise education takes the tide at the flood, and from the kindergarten
upward devotes the first years of education to training in construction
and to object-teaching. I need not recapitulate here what I said awhile
back about the superiority of the objective and experimental methods.
They occupy the pupil in a way most congruous with the spontaneous
interests of his age. They absorb him, and leave impressions durable and
profound. Compared with the youth taught by these methods, one brought
up exclusively by books carries through life a certain remoteness from
reality: he stands, as it were, out of the pale, and feels that he
stands so; and often suffers a kind of melancholy from which he might
have been rescued by a more real education.
There are other impulses, such as love of approbation or vanity, shyness
and secretiveness, of which a word might be said; but they are too
familiar to need it. You can easily pursue the subject by your own
reflection. There is one general law, however, that relates to many of
our instinctive tendencies, and that has no little importance in
education; and I must refer to it briefly before I leave the subject. It
has been called the law of transitoriness in instincts. Many of our
impulsive tendencies ripen at a certain period; and, if the appropriate
objects be then and there provided, habits of conduct toward them are
acquired which last. But, if the objects be not forthcoming then, the
impulse may die out before a habit is formed; and later it may be hard
to teach the creature to react appropriately in those directions. The
sucking instincts in mammals, the following instinct in certain birds
and quadrupeds, are examples of this: they fade away shortly after
birth.
In children we observe a ripening of impulses and interests in a certain
determinate order. Creeping, walking, climbing, imitating vocal sounds,
constructing, drawing, calculating, possess the child in succession; and
in some children the possession, while it lasts, may be of a
semi-frantic and exclusive sort. Later, the interest in any one of these
things may wholly fade away. Of course, the proper pedagogic moment to
work skill in, and to clench the useful habit, is when the native
impulse is most acutely present. Crowd on the athletic opportunities,
the mental arithmetic, the verse-learning, the drawing, the botany, or
what not, the moment you have reason to think the hour is ripe. The hour
may not last long, and while it continues you may safely let all the
child's other occupations take a second place. In this way you economize
time and deepen skill; for many an infant prodigy, artistic or
mathematical, has a flowering epoch of but a few months.
One can draw no specific rules for all this. It depends on close
observation in the particular case, and parents here have a great
advantage over teachers. In fact, the law of transitoriness has little
chance of individualized application in the schools.
Such is the little interested and impulsive psychophysical organism
whose springs of action the teacher must divine, and to whose ways he
must become accustomed. He must start with the native tendencies, and
enlarge the pupil's entire passive and active experience. He must ply
him with new objects and stimuli, and make him taste the fruits of his
behavior, so that now that whole context of remembered experience is
what shall determine his conduct when he gets the stimulus, and not the
bare immediate impression. As the pupil's life thus enlarges, it gets
fuller and fuller of all sorts of memories and associations and
substitutions; but the eye accustomed to psychological analysis will
discern, underneath it all, the outlines of our simple psychophysical
scheme.
Respect then, I beg you, always the original reactions, even when you
are seeking to overcome their connection with certain objects, and to
supplant them with others that you wish to make the rule. Bad behavior,
from the point of view of the teacher's art, is as good a starting-point
as good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, it is
often a better starting-point than good behavior would be.
The acquired reactions must be made habitual whenever they are
appropriate. Therefore Habit is the next subject to which your attention
is invited.
VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT
It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of
habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is
true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word
'habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they
have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit
and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the
moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But the fact is that our
virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it
has definite form, is but a mass of habits,--practical, emotional, and
intellectual,--systematically organized for our weal or woe, and
bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.
Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age, and since
to understand it contributes in no small measure to their feeling of
responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were able himself to
talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some such abstract terms as I
am now about to talk of it to you.
I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the
fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our
nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with
difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and
finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with
hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have (in Dr.
Carpenter's words) _grown_ to the way in which they have been exercised,
just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to