At our last meeting I treated of the native tendencies of the pupil to
react in characteristically definite ways upon different stimuli or
exciting circumstances. In fact, I treated of the pupil's instincts. Now
some situations appeal to special instincts from the very outset, and
others fail to do so until the proper connections have been organized in
the course of the person's training. We say of the former set of objects
or situations that they are _interesting_ in themselves and originally.
Of the latter we say that they are natively uninteresting, and that
interest in them has first to be acquired.
No topic has received more attention from pedagogical writers than that
of interest. It is the natural sequel to the instincts we so lately
discussed, and it is therefore well fitted to be the next subject which
we take up.
Since some objects are natively interesting and in others interest is
artificially acquired, the teacher must know which the natively
interesting ones are; for, as we shall see immediately, other objects
can artificially acquire an interest only through first becoming
associated with some of these natively interesting things.
The native interests of children lie altogether in the sphere of
sensation. Novel things to look at or novel sounds to hear, especially
when they involve the spectacle of action of a violent sort, will always
divert the attention from abstract conceptions of objects verbally taken
in. The grimace that Johnny is making, the spitballs that Tommy is ready
to throw, the dog-fight in the street, or the distant firebells
ringing,--these are the rivals with which the teacher's powers of being
interesting have incessantly to cope. The child will always attend more
to what a teacher does than to what the same teacher says. During the
performance of experiments or while the teacher is drawing on the
blackboard, the children are tranquil and absorbed. I have seen a
roomful of college students suddenly become perfectly still, to look at
their professor of physics tie a piece of string around a stick which he
was going to use in an experiment, but immediately grow restless when he
began to explain the experiment. A lady told me that one day, during a
lesson, she was delighted at having captured so completely the attention
of one of her young charges. He did not remove his eyes from her face;
but he said to her after the lesson was over, "I looked at you all the
time, and your upper jaw did not move once!" That was the only fact that
he had taken in.
Living things, then, moving things, or things that savor of danger or of
blood, that have a dramatic quality,--these are the objects natively
interesting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost everything else;
and the teacher of young children, until more artificial interests have
grown up, will keep in touch with her pupils by constant appeal to such
matters as these. Instruction must be carried on objectively,
experimentally, anecdotally. The blackboard-drawing and story-telling
must constantly come in. But of course these methods cover only the
first steps, and carry one but a little way.
Can we now formulate any general principle by which the later and more
artificial interests connect themselves with these early ones that the
child brings with him to the school?
Fortunately, we can: there is a very simple law that relates the
acquired and the native interests with each other.
_Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through
becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
The two associated objects grow, as it were, together: the interesting
portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not
interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real
and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing._ The odd
circumstance is that the borrowing does not impoverish the source, the
objects taken together being more interesting, perhaps, than the
originally interesting portion was by itself.
This is one of the most striking proofs of the range of application of
the principle of association of ideas in psychology. An idea will infect
another with its own emotional interest when they have become both
associated together into any sort of a mental total. As there is no
limit to the various associations into which an interesting idea may
enter, one sees in how many ways an interest may be derived.
You will understand this abstract statement easily if I take the most
frequent of concrete examples,--the interest which things borrow from
their connection with our own personal welfare. The most natively
interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes.
We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the
fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing. Lend
the child his books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give them to
him, make them his own, and notice the new light with which they
instantly shine in his eyes. He takes a new kind of care of them
altogether. In mature life, all the drudgery of a man's business or
profession, intolerable in itself, is shot through with engrossing
significance because he knows it to be associated with his personal
fortunes. What more deadly uninteresting object can there be than a
railroad time-table? Yet where will you find a more interesting object
if you are going on a journey, and by its means can find your train? At
such times the time-table will absorb a man's entire attention, its
interest being borrowed solely from its relation to his personal life.
_From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract programme for
the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with
the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some
immediate connection with these_. The kindergarten methods, the
object-teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-training work,--all
recognize this feature. Schools in which these methods preponderate are
schools where discipline is easy, and where the voice of the master
claiming order and attention in threatening tones need never be heard.
_Next, step by step, connect with these first objects and experiences
the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill. Associate the new
with the old in some natural and telling way, so that the interest,
being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses the entire system
of objects of thought._
This is the abstract statement; and, abstractly, nothing can be easier
to understand. It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty
lies; for the difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher
consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able
to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dulness in
discovering such transitions which the other shows. One teacher's mind
will fairly coruscate with points of connection between the new lesson
and the circumstances of the children's other experience. Anecdotes and
reminiscences will abound in her talk; and the shuttle of interest will
shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a
lively and entertaining way. Another teacher has no such inventive
fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy thing. This is
the psychological meaning of the Herbartian principle of 'preparation'
for each lesson, and of correlating the new with the old. It is the
psychological meaning of that whole method of concentration in studies
of which you have been recently hearing so much. When the geography and
English and history and arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references
to one another, you get an interesting set of processes all along the
line.
* * * * *
If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only
one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something
in their minds _to attend with_, when you begin to talk. That something
can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting
in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects
which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of
a logically associated or systematic whole. Fortunately, almost any kind
of a connection is sufficient to carry the interest along. What a help
is our Philippine war at present in teaching geography! But before the
war you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and
where they supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if glass is a
stone, and, if not, why not; and then let them know how stones are
formed and glass manufactured. External links will serve as well as
those that are deeper and more logical. But interest, once shed upon a
subject, is liable to remain always with that subject. Our acquisitions
become in a measure portions of our personal self; and little by little,
as cross-associations multiply and habits of familiarity and practice
grow, the entire system of our objects of thought consolidates, most of
it becoming interesting for some purposes and in some degree.
An adult man's interests are almost every one of them intensely
artificial: they have slowly been built up. The objects of professional
interest are most of them, in their original nature, repulsive; but by
their connection with such natively exciting objects as one's personal
fortune, one's social responsibilities, and especially by the force of
inveterate habit, they grow to be the only things for which in middle
life a man profoundly cares.
But in all these the spread and consolidation have followed nothing but
the principles first laid down. If we could recall for a moment our
whole individual history, we should see that our professional ideals and
the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one
mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we
reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, some little
story told, some little object shown, some little operation witnessed,
brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by
associating it with some one of those primitively there. The interest
now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so
insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in
swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose
feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects
of our thinking,--they hang to each other by associated links, but the
_original_ source of interest in all of them is the native interest
which the earliest one once possessed.