J. William
Talks To Teachers On Psychology
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Table of contents
TALKS TO TEACHERS
I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART
II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM
IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR
V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS
VI. NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS
VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE
VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT
IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS
X. INTEREST
XI. ATTENTION
XII. MEMORY
XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS
XIV. APPERCEPTION
XV. THE WILL
TALKS TO STUDENTS
I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION
II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS
III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT
TALKS TO TEACHERS
I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART
In
the general activity and uprising of ideal interests which every one
with an eye for fact can discern all about us in American life, there
is perhaps no more promising feature than the fermentation which for
a dozen years or more has been going on among the teachers. In
whatever sphere of education their functions may lie, there is to be
seen among them a really inspiring amount of searching of the heart
about the highest concerns of their profession. The renovation of
nations begins always at the top, among the reflective members of the
State, and spreads slowly outward and downward. The teachers of this
country, one may say, have its future in their hands. The earnestness
which they at present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen
themselves is an index of the nation's probabilities of advance in
all ideal directions. The outward organization of education which we
have in our United States is perhaps, on the whole, the best
organization that exists in any country. The State school systems
give a diversity and flexibility, an opportunity for experiment and
keenness of competition, nowhere else to be found on such an
important scale. The independence of so many of the colleges and
universities; the give and take of students and instructors between
them all; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to the
lower schools; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from
the older American recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one hand
the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which
considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving
the sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the
English tutorial system would seem too often to entail),—all these
things (to say nothing of that coeducation of the sexes in whose
benefits so many of us heartily believe), all these things, I say,
are most happy features of our scholastic life, and from them the
most sanguine auguries may be drawn.Having
so favorable an organization, all we need is to impregnate it with
geniuses, to get superior men and women working more and more
abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a generation or two
America may well lead the education of the world. I must say that I
look forward with no little confidence to the day when that shall be
an accomplished fact.No
one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak, in
pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. The desire of the
schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their
aspiration toward the 'professional' spirit in their work, have led
them more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental principles.
And in these few hours which we are to spend together you look to me,
I am sure, for information concerning the mind's operations, which
may enable you to labor more easily and effectively in the several
schoolrooms over which you preside.Far
be it from me to disclaim for psychology all title to such hopes.
Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. And yet
I confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some of your
expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these
simple talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some
disappointment at the net results. In other words, I am not sure that
you may not be indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated.
That would not be altogether astonishing, for we have been having
something like a 'boom' in psychology in this country. Laboratories
and professorships have been founded, and reviews established. The
air has been full of rumors. The editors of educational journals and
the arrangers of conventions have had to show themselves enterprising
and on a level with the novelties of the day. Some of the professors
have not been unwilling to co-operate, and I am not sure even that
the publishers have been entirely inert. 'The new psychology' has
thus become a term to conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you
teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have
been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about our science, which
to a great extent has been more mystifying than enlightening.
Altogether it does seem as if there were a certain fatality of
mystification laid upon the teachers of our day. The matter of their
profession, compact enough in itself, has to be frothed up for them
in journals and institutes, till its outlines often threaten to be
lost in a kind of vast uncertainty. Where the disciples are not
independent and critical-minded enough (and I think that, if you
teachers in the earlier grades have any defect—the slightest touch
of a defect in the world—it is that you are a mite too docile), we
are pretty sure to miss accuracy and balance and measure in those who
get a license to lay down the law to them from above.As
regards this subject of psychology, now, I wish at the very threshold
to do what I can to dispel the mystification. So I say at once that
in my humble opinion there
is no 'new
psychology' worthy of the name. There is nothing but the old
psychology which began in Locke's time, plus a little physiology of
the brain and senses and theory of evolution, and a few refinements
of introspective detail, for the most part without adaptation to the
teacher's use. It is only the fundamental conceptions of psychology
which are of real value to the teacher; and they, apart from the
aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from being new.—I trust
that you will see better what I mean by this at the end of all these
talks.I
say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you
think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is
something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes
and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology
is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate
arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must
make the application, by using its originality.The
science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of
ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly.
The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and
check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to
criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. A
science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must
fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but
what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is
left exclusively to his own genius. One genius will do his work well
and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite
differently; yet neither will transgress the lines.The
art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and
sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as in the case of
Herbart) the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the
pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side, and the former was
not derived in any sense from the latter. The two were congruent, but
neither was subordinate. And so everywhere the teaching must
agree with the
psychology, but need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching
that would so agree; for many diverse methods of teaching may equally
well agree with psychological laws.To
know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall
be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have an
additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell
us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us.
That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the
concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the
teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the
least.The
science of psychology, and whatever science of general pedagogics may
be based on it, are in fact much like the science of war. Nothing is
simpler or more definite than the principles of either. In war, all
you have to do is to work your enemy into a position from which the
natural obstacles prevent him from escaping if he tries to; then to
fall on him in numbers superior to his own, at a moment when you have
led him to think you far away; and so, with a minimum of exposure of
your own troops, to hack his force to pieces, and take the remainder
prisoners. Just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into
such a state of interest in what you are going to teach him that
every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then
reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion
to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to
know what the next steps in connection with the subject are. The
principles being so plain, there would be nothing but victories for
the masters of the science, either on the battlefield or in the
schoolroom, if they did not both have to make their application to an
incalculable quantity in the shape of the mind of their opponent. The
mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working away from you as keenly
and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on the other side from
the scientific general. Just what the respective enemies want and
think, and what they know and do not know, are as hard things for the
teacher as for the general to find out. Divination and perception,
not psychological pedagogics or theoretic strategy, are the only
helpers here.But,
if the use of psychological principles thus be negative rather than
positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great use, all the
same. It certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. We
know in advance, if we are psychologists, that certain methods will
be wrong, so our psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us,
moreover, more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in
respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that
it has theory as well as practice at its back. Most of all, it
fructifies our independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see
our subject at two different angles,—to get a stereoscopic view, so
to speak, of the youthful organism who is our enemy, and, while
handling him with all our concrete tact and divination, to be able,
at the same time, to represent to ourselves the curious inner
elements of his mental machine. Such a complete knowledge as this of
the pupil, at once intuitive and analytic, is surely the knowledge at
which every teacher ought to aim.Fortunately
for you teachers, the elements of the mental machine can be clearly
apprehended, and their workings easily grasped. And, as the most
general elements and workings are just those parts of psychology
which the teacher finds most directly useful, it follows that the
amount of this science which is necessary to all teachers need not be
very great. Those who find themselves loving the subject may go as
far as they please, and become possibly none the worse teachers for
the fact, even though in some of them one might apprehend a little
loss of balance from the tendency observable in all of us to
overemphasize certain special parts of a subject when we are studying
it intensely and abstractly. But for the great majority of you a
general view is enough, provided it be a true one; and such a general
view, one may say, might almost be written on the palm of one's hand.Least
of all need you, merely
as teachers, deem
it part of your duty to become contributors to psychological science
or to make psychological observations in a methodical or responsible
manner. I fear that some of the enthusiasts for child-study have
thrown a certain burden on you in this way. By all means let
child-study go on,—it is refreshing all our sense of the child's
life. There are teachers who take a spontaneous delight in filling
syllabuses, inscribing observations, compiling statistics, and
computing the per cent. Child-study will certainly enrich their
lives. And, if its results, as treated statistically, would seem on
the whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes and
observations of which it in part consist do certainly acquaint us
more intimately with our pupils. Our eyes and ears grow quickened to
discern in the child before us processes similar to those we have
read of as noted in the children,—processes of which we might
otherwise have remained inobservant. But, for Heaven's sake, let the
rank and file of teachers be passive readers if they so prefer, and
feel free not to contribute to the accumulation. Let not the
prosecution of it be preached as an imperative duty or imposed by
regulation on those to whom it proves an exterminating bore, or who
in any way whatever miss in themselves the appropriate vocation for
it. I cannot too strongly agree with my colleague, Professor
Münsterberg, when he says that the teacher's attitude toward the
child, being concrete and ethical, is positively opposed to the
psychological observer's, which is abstract and analytic. Although
some of us may conjoin the attitudes successfully, in most of us they
must conflict.The
worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad
conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as
a psychologist. Our teachers are overworked already. Every one who
adds a jot or tittle of unnecessary weight to their burden is a foe
of education. A bad conscience increases the weight of every other
burden; yet I know that child-study, and other pieces of psychology
as well, have been productive of bad conscience in many a really
innocent pedagogic breast. I should indeed be glad if this passing
word from me might tend to dispel such a bad conscience, if any of
you have it; for it is certainly one of those fruits of more or less
systematic mystification of which I have already complained. The best
teacher may be the poorest contributor of child-study material, and
the best contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact is more
palpable than this.So
much for what seems the most reasonable general attitude of the
teacher toward the subject which is to occupy our attention.
II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
I
said a few minutes ago that the most general elements and workings of
the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted
with for his purposes.Now
the immediate
fact which psychology, the science of mind, has to study is also the
most general fact. It is the fact that in each of us, when awake (and
often when asleep),
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!
Lesen Sie weiter in der vollständigen Ausgabe!