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.