If all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which
ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in
the classroom.
_No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative
expression_,--this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to
forget.
An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in
no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is
physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind it in the way of
capacity acquired. Even as mere impression, it fails to produce its
proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain fully among the
acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole
cycle of our operations. Its _motor consequences_ are what clinch it.
Some effect due to it in the way of an activity must return to the mind
in the form of the _sensation of having acted_, and connect itself with
the impression. The most durable impressions are those on account of
which we speak or act, or else are inwardly convulsed.
The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them
parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely
read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest
possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is thus
a highly important kind of reactive behavior on our impressions; and it
is to be feared that, in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations
as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal
recitation as an element of complete training may nowadays be too much
forgotten.
When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of
reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those
methods of concrete object teaching which are the glory of our
contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as they are, are
insufficient. The pupil's words may be right, but the conceptions
corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a modern school,
therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to
do. He must keep notebooks, make drawings, plans, and maps, take
measurements, enter the laboratory and perform experiments, consult
authorities, and write essays. He must do in his fashion what is often
laughed at by outsiders when it appears in prospectuses under the title
of 'original work,' but what is really the only possible training for
the doing of original work thereafter. The most colossal improvement
which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the
introduction of the manual training schools; not because they will give
us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better
skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an
entirely different intellectual fibre. Laboratory work and shop work
engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference between
accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature's complexity and into
the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which
once wrought into the mind, remain there as lifelong possessions. They
confer precision; because, if you are _doing_ a thing, you must do it
definitely right or definitely wrong. They give honesty; for, when you
express yourself by making things, and not by using words, it becomes
impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity.
They beget a habit of self-reliance; they keep the interest and
attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher's
disciplinary functions to a minimum.
Of the various systems of manual training, so far as woodwork is
concerned, the Swedish Sloyd system, if I may have an opinion on such
matters, seems to me by far the best, psychologically considered. Manual
training methods, fortunately, are being slowly but surely introduced
into all our large cities. But there is still an immense distance to
traverse before they shall have gained the extension which they are
destined ultimately to possess.
* * * * *
No impression without expression, then,--that is the first pedagogic
fruit of our evolutionary conception of the mind as something
instrumental to adaptive behavior. But a word may be said in
continuation. The expression itself comes back to us, as I intimated a
moment ago, in the form of a still farther impression,--the impression,
namely, of what we have done. We thus receive sensible news of our
behavior and its results. We hear the words we have spoken, feel our own
blow as we give it, or read in the bystander's eyes the success or
failure of our conduct. Now this return wave of impression pertains to
the completeness of the whole experience, and a word about its
importance in the schoolroom may not be out of place.
It would seem only natural to say that, since after acting we normally
get some return impression of result, it must be well to let the pupil
get such a return impression in every possible case. Nevertheless, in
schools where examination marks and 'standing' and other returns of
result are concealed, the pupil is frustrated of this natural
termination of the cycle of his activities, and often suffers from the
sense of incompleteness and uncertainty; and there are persons who
defend this system as encouraging the pupil to work for the work's sake,
and not for extraneous reward. Of course, here as elsewhere, concrete
experience must prevail over psychological deduction. But, so far as our
psychological deduction goes, it would suggest that the pupil's
eagerness to know how well he does is in the line of his normal
completeness of function, and should never be balked except for very
definite reasons indeed.
Acquaint them, therefore, with their marks and standing and prospects,
unless in the individual case you have some special practical reason for
not so doing.