First of all, _Fear_. Fear of punishment has always been the great
weapon of the teacher, and will always, of course, retain some place in
the conditions of the schoolroom. The subject is so familiar that
nothing more need be said about it.
The same is true of _Love_, and the instinctive desire to please those
whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the
pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament
finds it impossible to secure.
Next, a word might be said about _Curiosity_. This is perhaps a rather
poor term by which to designate the _impulse toward better cognition_ in
its full extent; but you will readily understand what I mean. Novelties
in the way of sensible objects, especially if their sensational quality
is bright, vivid, startling, invariably arrest the attention of the
young and hold it until the desire to know more about the object is
assuaged. In its higher, more intellectual form, the impulse toward
completer knowledge takes the character of scientific or philosophic
curiosity. In both its sensational and its intellectual form the
instinct is more vivacious during childhood and youth than in after
life. Young children are possessed by curiosity about every new
impression that assails them. It would be quite impossible for a young
child to listen to a lecture for more than a few minutes, as you are now
listening to me. The outside sights and sounds would inevitably carry
his attention off. And, for most people in middle life, the sort of
intellectual effort required of the average schoolboy in mastering his
Greek or Latin lesson, his algebra or physics, would be out of the
question. The middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the routine
details of his business; and new truths, especially when they require
involved trains of close reasoning, are no longer within the scope of
his capacity.
The sensational curiosity of childhood is appealed to more particularly
by certain determinate kinds of objects. Material things, things that
move, living things, human actions and accounts of human action, will
win the attention better than anything that is more abstract. Here again
comes in the advantage of the object-teaching and manual training
methods. The pupil's attention is spontaneously held by any problem that
involves the presentation of a new material object or of an activity on
any one's part. The teacher's earliest appeals, therefore, must be
through objects shown or acts performed or described. Theoretic
curiosity, curiosity about the rational relations between things, can
hardly be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. The
sporadic metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made God, and why
they have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. But, when the
theoretic instinct is once alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of
pedagogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes, abstract
conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which all teachers
are familiar. And, both in its sensible and in its rational
developments, disinterested curiosity may be successfully appealed to in
the child with much more certainty than in the adult, in whom this
intellectual instinct has grown so torpid as usually never to awake
unless it enters into association with some selfish personal interest.
Of this latter point I will say more anon.
_Imitation_. Man has always been recognized as the imitative animal
_par excellence_. And there is hardly a book on psychology, however old,
which has not devoted at least one paragraph to this fact. It is
strange, however, that the full scope and pregnancy of the imitative
impulse in man has had to wait till the last dozen years to become
adequately recognized. M. Tarde led the way in his admirably original
work, "Les Lois de l'Imitation"; and in our own country Professors Royce
and Baldwin have kept the ball rolling with all the energy that could be
desired. Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue
of his imitativeness. We become conscious of what we ourselves are by
imitating others--the consciousness of what the others are precedes--the
sense of self grows by the sense of pattern. The entire accumulated
wealth of mankind--languages, arts, institutions, and sciences--is
passed on from one generation to another by what Baldwin has called
social heredity, each generation simply imitating the last. Into the
particulars of this most fascinating chapter of psychology I have no
time to go. The moment one hears Tarde's proposition uttered, however,
one feels how supremely true it is. Invention, using the term most
broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the
human race historically has walked.
Imitation shades imperceptibly into _Emulation_. Emulation is the
impulse to imitate what you see another doing, in order not to appear
inferior; and it is hard to draw a sharp line between the manifestations
of the two impulses, so inextricably do they mix their effects.
Emulation is the very nerve of human society. Why are you, my hearers,
sitting here before me? If no one whom you ever heard of had attended a
'summer school' or teachers' institute, would it have occurred to any
one of you to break out independently and do a thing so unprescribed by
fashion? Probably not. Nor would your pupils come to you unless the
children of their parents' neighbors were all simultaneously being sent
to school. We wish not to be lonely or eccentric, and we wish not to be
cut off from our share in things which to our neighbors seem desirable
privileges.
In the schoolroom, imitation and emulation play absolutely vital parts.
Every teacher knows the advantage of having certain things performed by
whole bands of children at a time. The teacher who meets with most
success is the teacher whose own ways are the most imitable. A teacher
should never try to make the pupils do a thing which she cannot do
herself. "Come and let me show you how" is an incomparably better
stimulus than "Go and do it as the book directs." Children admire a
teacher who has skill. What he does seems easy, and they wish to emulate
it. It is useless for a dull and devitalized teacher to exhort her
pupils to wake up and take an interest. She must first take one herself;
then her example is effective, as no exhortation can possibly be.
Every school has its tone, moral and intellectual. And this tone is a
mere tradition kept up by imitation, due in the first instance to the
example set by teachers and by previous pupils of an aggressive and
dominating type, copied by the others, and passed on from year to year,
so that the new pupils take the cue almost immediately. Such a tone
changes very slowly, if at all; and then always under the modifying
influence of new personalities aggressive enough in character to set new
patterns and not merely to copy the old. The classic example of this
sort of tone is the often quoted case of Rugby under Dr. Arnold's
administration. He impressed his own character as a model on the
imagination of the oldest boys, who in turn were expected and required
to impress theirs upon the younger set. The contagiousness of Arnold's
genius was such that a Rugby man was said to be recognizable all through
life by a peculiar turn of character which he acquired at school. It is
obvious that psychology as such can give in this field no precepts of
detail. As in so many other fields of teaching, success depends mainly
on the native genius of the teacher, the sympathy, tact, and perception
which enable him to seize the right moment and to set the right example.
Among the recent modern reforms of teaching methods, a certain
disparagement of emulation, as a laudable spring of action in the
schoolroom, has often made itself heard. More than a century ago,
Rousseau, in his 'Émile,' branded rivalry between one pupil and another
as too base a passion to play a part in an ideal education. "Let Émile,"
he said, "never be led to compare himself to other children. No
rivalries, not even in running, as soon as he begins to have the power
of reason. It were a hundred times better that he should not learn at
all what he could only learn through jealousy or vanity. But I would
mark out every year the progress he may have made, and I would compare
it with the progress of the following years. I would say to him: 'You
are now grown so many inches taller; there is the ditch which you jumped
over, there is the burden which you raised. There is the distance to
which you could throw a pebble, there the distance you could run over
without losing breath. See how much more you can do now!' Thus I should
excite him without making him jealous of any one. He would wish to
surpass himself. I can see no inconvenience in this emulation with his
former self."
Unquestionably, emulation with one's former self is a noble form of the
passion of rivalry, and has a wide scope in the training of the young.
But to veto and taboo all possible rivalry of one youth with another,
because such rivalry may degenerate into greedy and selfish excess, does
seem to savor somewhat of sentimentality, or even of fanaticism. The
feeling of rivalry lies at the very basis of our being, all social
improvement being largely due to it. There is a noble and generous kind
of rivalry, as well as a spiteful and greedy kind; and the noble and
generous form is particularly common in childhood. All games owe the
zest which they bring with them to the fact that they are rooted in the
emulous passion, yet they are the chief means of training in fairness
and magnanimity. Can the teacher afford to throw such an ally away?
Ought we seriously to hope that marks, distinctions, prizes, and other
goals of effort, based on the pursuit of recognized superiority, should
be forever banished from our schools? As a psychologist, obliged to
notice the deep and pervasive character of the emulous passion, I must
confess my doubts.
The wise teacher will use this instinct as he uses others, reaping its
advantages, and appealing to it in such a way as to reap a maximum of
benefit with a minimum of harm; for, after all, we must confess, with a
French critic of Rousseau's doctrine, that the deepest spring of action
in us is the sight of action in another. The spectacle of effort is what
awakens and sustains our own effort. No runner running all alone on a
race-track will find in his own will the power of stimulation which his
rivalry with other runners incites, when he feels them at his heels,
about to pass. When a trotting horse is 'speeded,' a running horse must
go beside him to keep him to the pace.
As imitation slides into emulation, so emulation slides into
_Ambition_; and ambition connects itself closely with _Pugnacity_ and
_Pride_. Consequently, these five instinctive tendencies form an
interconnected group of factors, hard to separate in the determination
of a great deal of our conduct. The _Ambitious Impulses_ would perhaps
be the best name for the whole group.
Pride and pugnacity have often been considered unworthy passions to
appeal to in the young. But in their more refined and noble forms they
play a great part in the schoolroom and in education generally, being in
some characters most potent spurs to effort. Pugnacity need not be
thought of merely in the form of physical combativeness. It can be taken
in the sense of a general unwillingness to be beaten by any kind of
difficulty. It is what makes us feel 'stumped' and challenged by arduous
achievements, and is essential to a spirited and enterprising character.
We have of late been hearing much of the philosophy of tenderness in
education; 'interest' must be assiduously awakened in everything,
difficulties must be smoothed away. _Soft_ pedagogics have taken the
place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But from this
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.