We are by this time fully launched upon the biological conception. Man
is an organism for reacting on impressions: his mind is there to help
determine his reactions, and the purpose of his education is to make
them numerous and perfect. _Our education means, in short, little more
than a mass of possibilities of reaction,_ acquired at home, at school,
or in the training of affairs. The teacher's task is that of supervising
the acquiring process.
This being the case, I will immediately state a principle which
underlies the whole process of acquisition and governs the entire
activity of the teacher. It is this:--
_Every acquired reaction is, as a rule, either a complication grafted on
a native reaction, or a substitute for a native reaction, which the same
object originally tended to provoke._
_The teacher's art consists in bringing about the substitution or
complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic
acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there_.
Without an equipment of native reactions on the child's part, the
teacher would have no hold whatever upon the child's attention or
conduct. You may take a horse to the water, but you cannot make him
drink; and so you may take a child to the schoolroom, but you cannot
make him learn the new things you wish to impart, except by soliciting
him in the first instance by something which natively makes him react.
He must take the first step himself. He must _do_ something before you
can get your purchase on him. That something may be something good or
something bad. A bad reaction is better than no reaction at all; for, if
bad, you can couple it with consequences which awake him to its badness.
But imagine a child so lifeless as to react in _no_ way to the teacher's
first appeals, and how can you possibly take the first step in his
education?
To make this abstract conception more concrete, assume the case of a
young child's training in good manners. The child has a native tendency
to snatch with his hands at anything that attracts his curiosity; also
to draw back his hands when slapped, to cry under these latter
conditions, to smile when gently spoken to, and to imitate one's
gestures.
Suppose now you appear before the child with a new toy intended as a
present for him. No sooner does he see the toy than he seeks to snatch
it. You slap the hand; it is withdrawn, and the child cries. You then
hold up the toy, smiling and saying, "Beg for it nicely,--so!" The child
stops crying, imitates you, receives the toy, and crows with pleasure;
and that little cycle of training is complete. You have substituted the
new reaction of 'begging' for the native reaction of snatching, when
that kind of impression comes.
Now, if the child had no memory, the process would not be educative. No
matter how often you came in with a toy, the same series of reactions
would fatally occur, each called forth by its own impression: see,
snatch; slap, cry; hear, ask; receive, smile. But, with memory there,
the child, at the very instant of snatching, recalls the rest of the
earlier experience, thinks of the slap and the frustration, recollects
the begging and the reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes
the 'nice' reaction for it, and gets the toy immediately, by eliminating
all the intermediary steps. If a child's first snatching impulse be
excessive or his memory poor, many repetitions of the discipline may be
needed before the acquired reaction comes to be an ingrained habit; but
in an eminently educable child a single experience will suffice.
One can easily represent the whole process by a brain-diagram. Such a
diagram can be little more than a symbolic translation of the immediate
experience into spatial terms; yet it may be useful, so I subjoin it.
[Illustration: FIGURE 1. THE BRAIN-PROCESSES BEFORE EDUCATION.]
Figure 1 shows the paths of the four successive reflexes executed by the
lower or instinctive centres. The dotted lines that lead from them to
the higher centres and connect the latter together, represent the
processes of memory and association which the reactions impress upon the
higher centres as they take place.
[Illustration: FIGURE 2. THE BRAIN-PROCESS AFTER EDUCATION.]
In Figure 2 we have the final result. The impression _see_ awakens the
chain of memories, and the only reactions that take place are the _beg_
and _smile_. The thought of the _slap_, connected with the activity of
Centre 2, inhibits the _snatch_, and makes it abortive, so it is
represented only by a dotted line of discharge not reaching the
terminus. Ditto of the _cry_ reaction. These are, as it were,
short-circuited by the current sweeping through the higher centres from
_see_ to _smile_. _Beg_ and _smile_, thus substituted for the original
reaction _snatch_, become at last the immediate responses when the
child sees a snatchable object in some one's hands.
The first thing, then, for the teacher to understand is the native
reactive tendencies,--the impulses and instincts of childhood,--so as to
be able to substitute one for another, and turn them on to artificial
objects.
* * * * *
It is often said that man is distinguished from the lower animals by
having a much smaller assortment of native instincts and impulses than
they, but this is a great mistake. Man, of course, has not the
marvellous egg-laying instincts which some articulates have; but, if we
compare him with the mammalia, we are forced to confess that he is
appealed to by a much larger array of objects than any other mammal,
that his reactions on these objects are characteristic and determinate
in a very high degree. The monkeys, and especially the anthropoids, are
the only beings that approach him in their analytic curiosity and width
of imitativeness. His instinctive impulses, it is true, get overlaid by
the secondary reactions due to his superior reasoning power; but thus
man loses the _simply_ instinctive demeanor. But the life of instinct
is only disguised in him, not lost; and when the higher brain-functions
are in abeyance, as happens in imbecility or dementia, his instincts
sometimes show their presence in truly brutish ways.
I will therefore say a few words about those instinctive tendencies
which are the most important from the teacher's point of view.