THE TRAINING OF THE MIND--EDUCATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY.
A great deal has been said and written about the physical and mental
differences shown by the young; and one of the most oft-repeated of
all the charges which we hear brought against the current methods of
teaching is that all children are treated alike. The point is carried
so far that a teacher is judged from the way he has or has not of
getting at the children under him as individuals. All this is a move
in the right direction; and yet the subject is still so vague that
many of the very critics who declaim against the similar treatment
which diverse pupils get at school have no clear idea of what is
needed; they merely make demands that the treatment shall suit the
child. How each child is to be suited, and the inquiry still back of
that, what peculiarity it is in this child or that which is to be
"suited"--these things are left to settle themselves.
It is my aim in this chapter to indicate some of the variations which
are shown by different children; and on the basis of such facts to
endeavour to arrive at a more definite idea of what variations of
treatment are called for in the several classes into which the
children are divided. I shall confine myself at first to those
differences which are more hereditary and constitutional.
_First Period--Early Childhood._--The first and most comprehensive
distinction is that based on the division of the life of man into the
two great spheres of reception and action. The "sensory" and the
"motor" are becoming the most common descriptive terms of current
psychology. We hear all the while of sensory processes, sensory
contents, sensory centres, sensory attention, etc.; and, on the other
hand, of motor processes, motor centres, motor ataxy, motor attention,
motor consciousness, etc. And in the higher reaches of mental
function, the same antithesis comes out in the contrast of sensory and
motor aphasia, alexia, sensory and motor types of memory and
imagination, etc. Indeed the tendency is now strong to think that when
we have assigned a given function of consciousness to one or other
side of the nervous apparatus, making it either sensory or motor, then
our duty to it is done. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the
distinction is throwing great light on the questions of mind which
involve also the correlative questions of the nervous system. This is
true of all questions of educational psychology.
This first distinction between children--as having general
application--is that which I may cover by saying that some are more
active, or motile, while others are more passive, or receptive. This
is a common enough distinction; but possibly a word or two on its
meaning in the constitution of the child may give it more actual
value.
The "active" person to the psychologist is one who is very responsive
to what we have called Suggestions. Suggestions may be described in
most general terms as any and all the influences from outside, from
the environment, both physical and personal, which get a lodgment in
consciousness and lead to action. A child who is "suggestible" to a
high degree shows it in what we call "motility." The suggestions which
take hold of him translate themselves very directly into action. He
tends to act promptly, quickly, unreflectively, assimilating the newer
elements of the suggestions of the environment to the ways of
behaviour fixed by his earlier habits. Generally such a person, child
or adult, is said to "jump" at conclusions; he is anxious to know in
order to act; he acts in some way on all events or suggestions, even
when no course of action is explicitly suggested, and even when one
attempts to keep him from acting.
Psychologically such a person is dominated by habit. And this means
that his nervous system sets, either by its hereditary tendencies or
by the undue predominance of certain elements in his education,
quickly in the direction of motor discharge. The great channels of
readiest out-pouring from the brain into the muscles have become fixed
and pervious; it is hard for the processes once started in the sense
centres, such as those of sight, hearing, etc., to hold in their
energies. They tend to unstable equilibrium in the direction of
certain motor combinations, which in their turn represent certain
classes of acts. This is habit; and the person of the extreme motor
type is always a creature of habit.
Now what is the line of treatment that such a child should have? The
necessity for getting an answer to this question is evident from what
was said above--i. e., that the very rise of the condition itself is
due, apart from heredity, oftener than not to the fact that he has not
had proper treatment from his teachers.
The main point for a teacher to have in mind in dealing with such a
boy or girl--the impulsive, active one, always responsive, but almost
always in error in what he says and does--is that here is a case of
habit. Habit is good; indeed, if we should go a little further we
should see that all education is the forming of habits; but here, in
this case, what we have is not habits, but habit. This child shows a
tendency to habit _as such_: to habits of any and every kind. The
first care of the teacher in order to the control of the formation of
habits is in some way to bring about a little inertia of habit, so to
speak--a short period of organic hesitation, during which the reasons
pro and con for each habit may be brought into the consciousness of
the child.
The means by which this tendency to crude, inconsiderate action on the
part of the child is to be controlled and regulated is one of the most
typical questions for the intelligent teacher. Its answer must be
different for children of different ages. The one thing to do, in
general, however, from the psychologist's point of view, is in some
way to bring about greater complications in the motor processes which
the child uses most habitually, and with this complication to get
greater inhibition along the undesirable lines of his activity.
Inhibition is the damming up of the processes for a period, causing
some kind of a "setback" of the energies of movement into the sensory
centres, or the redistribution of this energy in more varied and less
habitual discharges. With older children a rational method is to
analyze for them the mistakes they have made, showing the penalties
they have brought upon themselves by hasty action. This requires great
watchfulness. In class work, the teacher may profitably point out the
better results reached by the pupil who "stops to think." This will
bring to the reform of the hasty scholar the added motive of
semi-public comparison with the more deliberate members of the class.
Such procedure is quite unobjectionable if made a recognised part of
the class method; yet care should be taken that no scholar suffer
mortification from such comparisons. The matter may be "evened up" by
dwelling also on the merit of promptness which the scholar in question
will almost always be found to show.
For younger pupils as well as older more indirect methods of treatment
are more effective. The teacher should study the scholar to find the
general trend of his habits. Then oversight should be exercised over
both his tasks and his sports with certain objects in view. His
habitual actions should be made as complicated as his ability can cope
with; this in order to educate his habits and keep them from working
back into mere mechanism. If he shows his fondness for drawing by
marking his desk, see that he has drawing materials at hand and some
intelligent tasks in this line to do; not as tasks, but for himself.
Encourage him to make progress always, not simply to repeat himself.
If he has awkward habits of movement with his hands and feet, try to
get him interested in games that exercise these members in regular and
skilful ways.
Furthermore, in his intellectual tasks such a pupil should be trained,
as far as may be, on the more abstract subjects, which do not give
immediate openings for action. Mathematics is the best possible
discipline for him. Grammar also is good; it serves at once to
interest him, if it is well taught, in certain abstract relationships,
and also to send out his motor energies in the exercise of speech,
which is the function which always needs exercise, and which is always
under the observation of the teacher. Grammar, in fact, is one of the
very best of primary-school subjects, because instruction in it issues
at once in the very motor functions which embody the relationships
which the teacher seeks to impress. The teacher has in his ear, so to
speak, the evidence as to whether his instruction is understood or
not. This gives him a valuable opportunity to keep his instruction
well ahead of its motor expression--thus leading the pupil to think
rather than to act without thinking--and at the same time to point out
the errors of performance which follow from haste in passing from
thought to action.
These indirect methods of reaching the impulsive pupil should never be
cast aside for the direct effort to "control" such a scholar. The very
worst thing that can be done to such a boy or girl is to command him
or her to sit still or not to act; and a still worse thing--to make a
comparative again on the head of the superlative--is to affix to the
command painful penalties. This is a direct violation of the principle
of Suggestion. Such a command only tends to empty the pupil's mind of
other objects of thought and interest, and so to keep his attention
upon his own movements. This, then, amounts to a continual suggestion
to him to do just what you want to keep him from doing. On the
contrary, unless you give him suggestions and interests which lead his
thought away from his acts, it is impossible not to aggravate his bad
tendencies by your very efforts. This is the way, as I intimated
above, that many teachers create or confirm bad habits in their
pupils, and so render any amount of well-intended positive instruction
abortive. It seems well established that a suggestion of the
negative--that is, not to do a thing--has no negative force; but, on
the contrary, in the early period, it amounts only to a stronger
suggestion in the positive sense, since it adds emphasis, to the thing
which is forbidden. The "not" in a prohibition is no addition to the
pictured course to which it is attached, and the physiological fact
that the attention tends to set up action upon that which is attended
to comes in to put a premium on disobedience. Indeed, the philosophy
of all punishment rests in this consideration, i. e., that unless the
penalty tends to fill the mind with some object other than the act
punished, it does more harm than good. The punishment must be actual
and its nature diverting; never a threat which terminates there, nor a
penalty which fixes the thought of the offence more strongly in mind.
This is to say, that the permanent inhibition of a movement at this
period is best secured by establishing some different movement.
The further consideration of the cases of great motility would lead to
the examination of the kinds of memory and imagination and their
treatment; to that we return below. We may now take up the instances
of the sensory type considered with equal generality.
The sensory children are in the main those which seem more passive,
more troubled with physical inertia, more contemplative when a little
older, less apt in learning to act out new movements, less quick at
taking a hint, etc.
These children are generally further distinguished as being--and here
the antithesis to the motor ones is very marked--much less
suggestible. They seem duller when young. Boys often get credit for
dulness compared with girls on this account. Even as early as the
second year can this distinction among children be readily observed in
many instances. The motor child will show sorrow by loud crying and
vigorous action, while the sensory child will grieve in quiet, and
continue to grieve when the other has forgotten the disagreeable
occurrence altogether. The motor one it is that asks a great many
questions and seems to learn little from the answers; while the
sensory one learns simply from hearing the questions of the other and
the answers given to them. The motor child, again, gets himself hurt a
great many times in the same way, without developing enough
self-control to restrain himself from the same mistake again and
again; the sensory child tends to be timid in the presence of the
unknown and uncertain, to learn from one or a few experiences, and to
hold back until he gets satisfactory assurances that danger is absent.
The former tends to be more restless in sitting, standing, etc., more
demonstrative in affection, more impulsive in action, more forgiving
in disposition.
As to the treatment of the sensory child, it is a problem of even
greater difficulty and danger than that of his motor brother. The very
nature of the distinction makes it evident that while the motor
individual "gives himself away," so to speak, by constantly acting out
his impressions, and so revealing his progress and his errors, with
the other it is not so. All knowledge that we are ever able to get of
the mental condition of another individual is through his movements,
expressive, in a technical sense, or of other kinds, such as his
actions, attitudes, lines of conduct, etc. We have no way to read
thought directly. So just in so far as the sensory individual is less
active, to that degree he is less expressive, less self-revealing. To
the teacher, therefore, he is more of an enigma. It is harder to tell
in his case what instruction he has appreciated and made his own; and
what, on the other hand, has been too hard for him; what wise, and
what unwise. Where the child of movement speaks out his impulsive
interpretations, this one sinks into himself and gives no answer. So
we are deprived of the best way of interpreting him--that afforded by
his own interpretation of himself.
A general policy of caution is therefore strongly to be recommended.
Let the teacher wait in every case for some positive indication of the
child's real state of mind. Even the directions given the child may
not have been understood, or the quick word of admonition may have
wounded him, or a duty which is so elementary as to be a commonplace
in the mental life of the motor child may yet be so vaguely
apprehended that to insist upon its direct performance may cost the
teacher all his influence with the pupil of this type. It is better to
wait even at the apparent risk of losing valuable days than to proceed
a single step upon a mistaken estimate of the child's measure of
assimilation. And, further, the effect of wrong treatment upon this
boy or girl is very different from that of a similar mistake in the
other case. He becomes more silent, retired, even secretive, when once
an unsympathetic relationship is suggested between him and his elder.
Then more positively--his instruction should be well differentiated.
He should in every possible case be given inducements to express
himself. Let him recite a great deal. Give him simple verses to
repeat. Keep him talking all you can. Show him his mistakes with the
utmost deliberation and kindliness of manner; and induce him to repeat
his performances in your hearing after the correction has been
suggested. Cultivate the imitative tendency in him; it is the handmaid
to the formation of facile habits of action. In arranging the
children's games, see that he gets the very active parts, even though
he be backward and hesitating about assuming them. Make him as far as
possible a leader, in order to cultivate his sense of responsibility
for the doing of things, and to lead to the expression of his
understanding of arrangements, etc. In it all, the essential thing is
to bring him out in some kind of expression; both for the sake of the
improved balance it gives himself, and as an indication to the
observant teacher of his progress and of the next step to be taken in
his development.
It is for the sensory child, I think, that the kindergarten has its
great utility. It gives him facility in movement and expression, and
also some degree of personal and social confidence. But for the same
reasons the kindergarten over-stimulates the motor scholars at the
corresponding age. There should really be two kindergarten
methods--one based on the idea of deliberation, the other on that of
expression.
The task of the educator here, it is evident, is to help nature
correct a tendency to one-sided development; just as the task is this
also in the former case; but here the variation is on the side of
idiosyncrasy ultimately, and of genius immediately. For genius, I
think, is the more often developed from the contemplative mind, with
the relatively dammed-up brain, of this child, than from the
smooth-working machine of the motor one. But just for this reason, if
the damming-up be liberated, not in the channels of healthy
assimilation, and duly correlated growth, but in the forced discharges
of violent emotion, followed by conditions of melancholy and by
certain unsocial tendencies, then the promise of genius ripens into
eccentricity, and the blame is possibly ours.
It seems true--although great caution is necessary in drawing
inferences--that here a certain distinction may be found to hold also
between the sexes. It is possible that the apparent precocious
alertness of girls in their school years, and earlier, may be simply a
predominance among them of the motor individuals. This is borne out by
the examination of the kinds of performance in which they seem to be
more forward than boys. It resolves itself, so far as my observation
goes, into greater quickness of response and greater agility in
performance; not greater constructiveness, nor greater power of
concentrated attention. The boys seem to need more instruction because
they do not learn as much for themselves by acting upon what they
already know. In later years, the distinction gets levelled off by the
common agencies of education, and by the setting of tasks requiring
more thought than the mere spontaneities of either type avail to
furnish. Yet all the way through, I think there is something in the
ordinary belief that woman is relatively more impulsive and more prone
to the less reflective forms of action.
What has now been said may be sufficient to give some concrete force
to the common opinion that education should take account of the
individual character at this earliest stage. The general distinction
between sensory and motor has, however, a higher application in the
matter of memory and imagination at later stages of growth, to which
we may now turn.
_Second Period._--The research is of course more difficult as the
pupil grows older, since the influences of heredity tend to become
blurred by the more constant elements of the child's home, school, and
general social environment. The child whom I described just above as
sensory in his type is constantly open to influences from the
stimulating behaviour of his motor companion, as well as from the
direct measures which parent and teacher take to overcome his
too-decided tendencies and to prevent one-sided development. So, too,
the motor child tends to find correctives in his environment.
The analogy, however, between the more organic and hereditary
differences in individuals, and the intellectual and moral variations
which they tend to develop with advance in school age, is very
marked; and we find a similar series of distinctions in the later
period. The reason that there is a correspondence between the
variations given in heredity and those due in the main to the
educative influences of the single child's social environment is in
itself very suggestive, but space does not permit its exposition here.
The fact is this: the child tends, under the influence of his home,
school, social surroundings, etc., to develop a marked character
either in the sensory or in the motor direction, in his memory,
imagination, and general type of mind.
Taking up the "motor" child first, as before, we find that his
psychological growth tends to confirm him in his hereditary type. In
all his social dealing with other children he is more or less
domineering and self-assertive; or at least his conduct leads one to
form that opinion of him. He seems to be constantly impelled to act so
as to show himself off. He "performs" before people, shows less
modesty than may be thought desirable in one of his tender years,
impresses the forms of his own activity upon the other children, who
come to stand about him with minds constrained to follow him. He is an
object lesson in both the advantages and the risks of an aggressive
life policy. He has a suggestion to make in every emergency, a line of
conduct for each of his company, all marked out or supplied on the
spur of the moment by his own quick sense of appropriate action; and
for him, as for no one else, to hesitate is to be lost.
Now what this general policy or method of growth means to his
consciousness is becoming more and more clear in the light of the
theory of mental types. The reason a person is motor is that his mind
tends always to be filled up most easily with memories or revived
images of the twitchings, tensions, contractions, expansions, of the
activities of the muscular system. He is a motor because the means of
his thought generally, the mental coins which pass current in his
thought exchange, are muscular sensations or the traces which such
sensations have left in his memory. The very means by which he thinks
of a situation, an event, a duty, is not the way it looked, or the way
it sounded, or the way it smelt, tasted, or felt to the touch--in any
of the experiences to which these senses are involved--but the means,
the representatives, the instruments of his thought, are the feelings
of the way he has acted. He has a tendency--and he comes to have it
more and more--to get a muscular representation of everything; and his
gauge of the value of this or that is this muscular measure of it, in
terms of the action which it is calculated to draw out.
It is then this preference for one particular kind of mental imagery,
and that the motor, or muscular kind, which gives this type of child
his peculiarity in this more psychological period. When we pass from
the mere outward and organic description of his peculiarities,
attempted above in the case of very young children, and aim to
ascertain the mental peculiarity which accompanies it and carries on
the type through the individual's maturer years, we see our way to its
meaning. The fact is that a peculiar kind of mental imagery tends to
swell up in consciousness and monopolize the theatre of thought. This
is only another way of saying that the attention is more or less
educated in the direction represented by this sort of imagery. Every
time a movement is thought of, in preference to a sound or a sight
which is also available, the habit of giving the attention to the
muscular equivalents of things becomes more firmly fixed. This
continues until the motor habit of attention becomes the only easy and
normal way of attending; and then the person is fixed in his type for
one, many, or all of his activities of thinking and action.
So now it is no longer difficult to see, I trust, why it is that the
child or youth of this sort has the characteristics which he has. It
is a familiar principle that attention to the thought of a movement
tends to start that very movement. I defy any of my readers to think
hard and long of winking the left eye and not have an almost
irresistible impulse to wink that eye. There is no better way to make
it difficult for a child to sit still than to tell him to sit still;
for your words fill up his attention, as I had occasion to say above,
with the thought of movements, and these thoughts bring on the
movements, despite the best intentions of the child in the way of
obedience. Watch an audience of little children--and children of an
older growth will also do--when an excited speaker harangues them with
many gestures, and see the comical reproduction of the gestures by the
children's hands. They picture the movements, the attention is fixed
on them, and appropriate actions follow.
It is only the generalizing of these phenomena that we find realized
in the boy or girl of the motor type. Such a child is constantly
thinking of things by their movement equivalents. Muscular sensations
throng up in consciousness at every possible signal and by every train
of association; so it is not at all surprising that all informations,
instructions, warnings, reproofs, suggestions, pass right through such
a child's consciousness and express themselves by the channels of
movement. Hence the impulsive, restless, domineering, unmeditative
character of the child. We may now endeavour to describe a little more
closely his higher mental traits.
1. In the first place the motor mind tends to _very quick
generalization_. Every teacher knows the boys in school who anticipate
their conclusions, on the basis of a single illustration. They reach
the general notion which is most broad in extent, in application, but
most shallow in intent, in richness, in real explaining or descriptive
meaning. For example, such a boy will hear the story of Napoleon,
proceed to define heroism in terms of military success, and then go
out and try the Napoleon act upon his playfellows. This tendency to
generalize is the mental counterpart of the tendency to act seen in
his conduct. The reason he generalizes is that the brain energies are
not held back in the channels of perception, but pour themselves right
out toward the motor equivalents of former perceptions which were in
any way similar; then the present perceptions are lost in the old ones
toward which attention is held by habit, and action follows. To the
child all heroes are Napoleons because Napoleon was the first hero,
and the channels of action inspired by him suffice now for the
appropriate conduct.
2. Such a scholar is very _poor at noting and remembering
distinctions_. This follows naturally from the hasty generalizations
which he makes. Having once identified a new fact as the same as an
old one, and having so reached a defective sense of the general
class, it is then more and more hard for him to retrace his steps and
sort out the experiences more carefully. Even when he discovers his
mistake, his old impulse to act seizes him again, and he rushes to
some new generalization wherewith to replace the old, again falling
into error by his stumbling haste to act. The teacher is oftener
perhaps brought to the verge of impatience by scholars of this class
than by any others.
3. Following, again, from these characteristics, there is a third
remark to be made about the youth of this type; and it bears upon a
peculiarity which it is very hard for the teacher to estimate and
control. These motor boys and girls have what I may characterize as
_fluidity of the attention_. By this is meant a peculiar quality of
mind which all experienced teachers are in some degree familiar with,
and which they find baffling and unmanageable.
By "fluidity" of the attention I mean the state of hurry, rush,
inadequate inspection, quick transition, all-too-ready-assimilation,
hear-but-not-heed, in-one-ear-and-out-the-other habit of mind. The
best way to get an adequate sense of the state is to recall the pupil
who has it to the most marked degree, and picture his mode of dealing
with your instructions. Such a pupil hears your words, says "yes,"
even acts appropriately so far as your immediate instructions go; but
when he comes to the same situation again, he is as virginly innocent
of your lesson as if his teacher had never been born. Psychologically,
the state differs from preoccupation, which characterizes quite a
different type of mind. The motor boy is not preoccupied. Far from
that, he is quite ready to attend to you. But when he attends, it is
with a momentary concentration--with a rush like the flow of a
mountain stream past the point of the bank on which you sit. His
attention is flowing, always in transition, leaping from "it to that,"
with superb agility and restlessness. But the exercise it gains from
its movements is its only reward. Its acquisitions are slender in the
extreme. It illustrates, on the mental plane, the truth of the
"rolling stone." It corresponds, as a mental character, to the
muscular restlessness which the same type of child shows in the
earlier period previously spoken of.
The psychological explanation of this "fluid attention" is more or
less plain, but I can not take space to expound it. Suffice it to say
that the attention is itself, probably, in its brain seat, a matter of
the motor centres; its physical seat both "gives and takes" in
co-operation with the processes which shed energy out into the
muscles. So it follows that, in the ready muscular revivals,
discharges, transitions, which we have seen to be prominent in the
motor temperament the attention is carried along, and its "fluidity"
is only an incident to the fluidity of the motor symbols of which this
sort of a mind continually makes use.
Coming a little closer to the pedagogical problems which this type of
pupil raises before us, we find, in the first place, that it is
excessively difficult for this scholar to give continuous or adequate
attention to anything of any complexity. The movements of attention
are so easy, the outlets of energy, to use the physical figure, so
large and well used, that the minor relationships of the thing are
passed over. The variations of the object from its class are swept
away in the onrush of his motor tendencies. He assumes the facts which
he does not understand, and goes right on to express himself in
action on these assumptions. So while he seems to take in what is told
him, with an intuition that is surprisingly swift, and a personal
adaptation no less surprising, the disappointment is only the more
keen when the instructor finds the next day that he has not penetrated
at all into the inner current of this scholar's mental processes.
Again, as marked as this is in its early stages, the continuance of it
leads to results which are nothing short of deplorable. When such a
student has gone through a preparatory school without overcoming this
tendency to "fluid attention" and comes to college, the instructors in
the higher institutions are practically helpless before him. We say of
him that "he has never learned to study," that he does not know "how
to apply himself," that he has no "power of assimilation." All of
which simply means that his channels of reaction are so formed already
that no instruction can get sufficient lodgment in him to bring about
any modification of his "apperceptive systems." The embarrassment is
the more marked because such a youth, all through his education
period, is willing, ready, evidently receptive, prompt, and punctual
in all his tasks.
Now what shall be done with such a student in his early school years?
This is a question for the secondary teacher especially, apart from
the more primary measures recommended above. It is in the years
between eight and fifteen that this type of mind has its rapid
development; before that the treatment is mainly preventive, and
consists largely in suggestions which aim to make the muscular
discharges more deliberate and the general tone less explosive. But
when the boy or girl comes to school with the dawning capacity for
independent self-direction and personal application, then it is that
the problem of the motor scholar becomes critical. The "let-alone"
method puts a premium upon the development of his tendencies and the
eventual playing out of his mental possibilities in mere motion.
Certain positive ways of giving some indirect discipline to the mind
of this type may be suggested.
Give this student relatively difficult and complex tasks. There is no
way to hinder his exuberant self-discharges except by measures which
embarrass and baffle him. We can not "lead him into all truth"; we
have to drive him back from all error. The lessons of psychology are
to the effect that the normal way to teach caution and deliberation is
the way of failure, repulse, and unfortunate, even painful,
consequences. Personal appeals to him do little good, since it is a
part of his complaint that he is too ready to hear all appeals; and
also, since he is not aware of his own lack nor able to carry what he
hears into effect. So keep him in company of scholars a little more
advanced than he is. Keep him out of the concert recitations, where
his tendency to haste would work both personal and social harm.
Refrain from giving him assistance in his tasks until he has learned
from them something of the real lesson of discouragement, and then
help him only by degrees, and by showing him one step at a time, with
constant renewals of his own efforts. Shield him with the greatest
pains from distractions of all kinds, for even the things and events
about him may carry his attention off at the most critical moments.
Give him usually the secondary parts in the games of the school,
except when real planning, complex execution, and more or less
generalship are required; then give him the leading parts: they
exercise his activities in new ways not covered by habit, and if he do
not rise to their complexity, then the other party to the sport will,
and his haste will have its own punishment, and so be a lesson to him.
Besides these general checks and regulations, there remains the very
important question as to what studies are most available for this type
of mind. I have intimated already the general answer that ought to be
given to this question. The aim of the studies of the motor student
should be discipline in the direction of correct generalization, and,
as helpful to this, discipline in careful observation of concrete
facts. On the other hand, the studies which involve principles simply
of a descriptive kind should have little place in his daily study.
They call out largely the more mechanical operations of memory, and
their command can be secured for the most part by mere repetition of
details all similar in character and of equal value. The measure of
the utility to him of the different studies of the schoolroom is found
in the relative demand they make upon him to modify his hasty personal
reactions, to suspend his thoughtless rush to general results, and
back of it all, to hold the attention long enough upon the facts as
they arise to get some sense of the logical relationships which bind
them together. Studies which do not afford any logical relationships,
and which tend, on the contrary, to foster the habit of learning by
repetition, only tend to fix the student in the quality of attention
which I have called "fluidity."
In particular, therefore: give this student all the mathematics he
can absorb, and pass him from arithmetic into geometry, leaving his
algebra till later. Give him plenty of grammar, taught inductively.
Start him early in the elements of physics and chemistry. And as
opposed to this, keep him out of the classes of descriptive botany and
zoölogy. Rather let him join exploring parties for the study of
plants, stones, and animals. A few pet animals are a valuable adjunct
to any school museum. If there be an industrial school or machine shop
near at hand, try to get him interested in the way things are made,
and encourage him to join in such employments. A false generalization
in the wheels of a cart supplies its own corrective very quickly, or
in the rigging and sails of a toy boat. Drawing from models is a fine
exercise for such a youth, and drawing from life, as soon as he gets a
little advanced in the control of his pencil. All this, it is easy to
see, trains his impulsive movements into some degree of subjection to
the deliberative processes.
With this general line of treatment in mind, the details of which the
reader will work out in the light of the boy's type, space allows me
only two more points before I pass to the sensory scholar.
First, in all the teaching of the type of mind now in question, pursue
a method which proceeds from the particular to the general. The
discussion of pedagogical method with all its ins and outs needs to
take cognizance of the differences of students in their type. The
motor student should never, in normal cases, be given a general
formula and told to work out particular instances; that is too much
his tendency already--to approach facts from the point of view of
their resemblances. What he needs rather is a sense of the dignity of
the single fact, and of the necessity of giving it its separate place,
before hastening on to lose it in the flow of a general statement. So
whether the teacher have in hand mathematics, grammar, or science, let
him disclose the principles only gradually, and always only so far as
they are justified by the observations which the boy has been led to
make for himself. For the reason that such a method is practically
impossible in the descriptive sciences, and some other branches, as
taught in the schoolbooks--botany, zoölogy, and, worse than all,
history and geography--we should restrict their part in the discipline
studies of such a youth. They require simple memory, without
observation, and put a premium on hasty and temporary acquisition.
As I have said, algebra should be subordinated to geometry. Algebra
has as its distinctive method the principle of substitution, whereby
symbols of equal and, for the most part, absolute generality are
substituted for one another, and the results stand for one fact as
well as for another, in disregard of the worth of the particular in
the scheme of nature. For the same reason, deductive logic is not a
good discipline for these students; empirical psychology, or political
economy, is a better introduction to the moral sciences for them when
they reach the high school. This explains what was meant above in the
remark as to the method of teaching grammar. As to language study
generally, I think the value of it, at this period, and later, is
extraordinarily overrated. The proportion of time given to language
study in our secondary schools is nothing short of a public crime in
its effect upon students of this type--and indeed of any type. This,
however, is a matter to which we return below. The average student
comes to college with his sense of exploration, his inductive
capacity, stifled at its birth. He stands appalled when confronted
with the unassimilated details of any science which does not give him
a "key" in the shape of general formulas made up beforehand. Were it
not that his enlarging experience of life is all the while running
counter to the trend of his so-called education, he would probably
graduate ready for the social position in which authority takes the
place of evidence, and imitation is the method of life.
Second, the teacher should be on the lookout for a tendency which is
very characteristic of a student of this type, the tendency, i. e., to
fall into elaborate guessing at results. Take a little child of about
seven or eight years of age, especially one who has the marks of motor
heredity, and observe the method of his acquisition of new words in
reading. First he speaks the word which his habit dictates, and, that
being wrong, he rolls his eyes away from the text and makes a guess of
the first word that comes into his mind; this he keeps up as long as
the teacher persists in asking him to try again. Here is the same
tendency that carries him later on in his education to a general
conclusion by a short cut. He has not learned to interpret the data of
a deliberate judgment, and his attention does not dwell on the
necessary details. So with him all through his training; he is always
ready with a guess. Here, again, the teacher can do him good only by
patiently employing the inductive method. Lead him back to the
simplest elements of the problem in hand, and help him gradually to
build up a result step by step.
I think in this, as in most of the work with these scholars, the
association with children of the opposite type is one of the best
correctives, provided the companionship is not made altogether
one-sided by the motor boy's perpetual monopolizing of all the avenues
of personal expression. When he fails in the class, the kind of social
lesson which is valuable may be taught him by submitting the same
question to a pupil of the plodding, deliberate kind, and waiting for
the latter to work it out. Of course, if the teacher have any
supervision over the playground, similar treatment can be employed
there.
Coming to consider the so-called "sensory" youth of the age between
eight, let us say, and sixteen--the age during which the training of
the secondary school presents its great problems--we find certain
interesting contrasts between this type and that already characterized
as "motor." The study of this type of youth is the more pressing for
reasons which I have already hinted in considering the same type in
the earlier childhood period. It is necessary, first, to endeavour to
get a fairly adequate view of the psychological characteristics of
this sort of pupil.
The current psychological doctrine of mental "types" rests upon a
great mass of facts, drawn in the first instance from the different
kinds of mental trouble, especially those which involve derangements
of speech--the different kinds of Aphasia. The broadest generalization
which is reached from these facts is that which marks the distinction,
of which I have already said so much, between the motor and the
sensory types. But besides this general distinction there are many
finer ones; and in considering the persons of the sensory type, it is
necessary to inquire into these finer distinctions. Not only do men
and children differ in the matter of the sort of mental material which
they find requisite, as to whether it is pictures of movements on the
one hand, or pictures from the special senses on the other hand; but
they differ also in the latter case with respect to which of the
special senses it is, in this case or that, which gives the particular
individual his necessary cue, and his most perfect function. So we
find inside of the general group called "sensory" several relatively
distinct cases, all of which the teacher is likely to come across in
varying numbers in a class of pupils. Of these the "visual" and the
"auditory" are most important.
There are certain aspects of the case which are so common to all the
cases of sensory minds, whether they be visual, auditory, or other,
that I may set them out before proceeding further.
First, in all these matters of type distinction, one of the essential
things to observe is the behaviour of the Attention. We have already
seen that the attention is implicated to a remarkable degree--in what
I called "fluid attention" above--in the motor scholar. The same
implication of the attention occurs in all the sensory cases, but
presents very different aspects; and the common fact that the
attention is directly involved affords us one of the best rules of
judgment and distinction. We may say, generally, of the sensory
children, that the attention is best, most facile, most
interest-carrying for some one preferred sense, leading for this sense
into preoccupation and ready distraction. This tendency manifests
itself, as we saw above, in the motor persons also, taking effect in
action, speed, vivacity, hasty generalization, etc.; but in the
sensory one it takes on varying forms. This first aspect of our
typical distinction of minds we may call "the relation of the
'favoured function' to the attention."
Then, second, there is another and somewhat contrasted relation which
also assumes importance when we come to consider individual cases; and
that is the relation of the "favoured function"--say movement, vision,
hearing, etc.--to Habit. It is a common enough observation, that habit
renders functions easy, and that habits are hard to break; indeed, all
treatment of habits is likely to degenerate into the commonplace. But,
when looked at as related to the attention, certain truths emerge from
the consideration of habit.
In general, we may say that habit bears a twofold relation to
attention: on the one hand, _facile attention shows the reign of
habit_. The solid acquisitions are those with which attention is at
home, and which are therefore more or less habitual. But, on the other
hand, it is equally true that _attention is in inverse ratio to
habit_. We need to attend least to these functions which are most
habitual, and we have to attend most to those which are novel and only
half acquired. We get new acquisitions mainly, indeed, by strained
attention. So we have a contrast of possible interpretations in all
cases of sharp and exclusive attention by the children: _does the
attention represent a Habit in this particular action of the
child_?--or, _does it represent the breaking up of a habit, an act of
Accommodation_? In each case these questions have to be intelligently
considered. The motor person, usually, when uninstructed and not held
back, uses his attention under the lead of habit. It is largely the
teacher's business in his case, as we saw, to get him to hold,
conserve, and direct his attention steadily to the novel and the
complex. The sensory person, on the other hand, shows the attention
obstructed by details, hindered by novelties, unable to pass smoothly
over its acquisitions, and in general lacking the regular influence of
habit in leading him to summarize and utilize his mental store in
general ways.
The third general aspect of the topic is this: the person of the
sensory type is more likely to be the one in whom positive derangement
occurs in the higher levels, and in response to the more refined
social and personal influences. This, for the reason that this type
represents brain processes of greater inertia and complexity, with
greater liability to obstruction. They are slower, and proceed over
larger brain areas.
With these general remarks, then, on the wider aspects of the
distinction of types, we may now turn to one of the particular cases
which occurs among sensory individuals. This is all that our space
will allow.
_The Visual Type._--The so-called "visuals," or "eye-minded" people
among us, are numerically the largest class of the sensory population.
They resort to visual imagery whenever possible, either because that
is the prevailing tendency with them, or because, in the particular
function in question in any special act, the visual material comes
most readily to mind. The details of fact regarding the "visuals" are
very interesting; but I shall not take space to dwell upon them. The
sphere in which the facts regarding the pupil of this type are
important to the teacher is that of language, taken with the group of
problems which arise about instruction in language. The question of
his symbolism, and its relations to mathematics, logic, etc., is
important. And finally, the sphere of the pupil's _expression_ in all
its forms. Then, from all his discoveries in these things, the teacher
is called upon to make his method of teaching and his general
treatment suitable to this student.
The visual pupil usually shows himself to be so predominately in his
speech and language functions; he learns best and fastest from copies
which he sees. He delights in illustrations put in terms of vision, as
when actually drawn out on the blackboard for him to see. He
understands what he reads better than what he hears; and he uses his
visual symbols as a sort of common coin into which to convert the
images which come to him through his other senses. In regard to the
movements of attention, we may say that this boy or girl illustrates
both the aspects of the attention-function which I pointed out above;
he attends best--that is, most effectively--to visual instruction
provided he exert himself; but on the other hand, it is just here that
the drift of habit tends to make him superficial. As attention to the
visual is the most easy for him, and as the details of his visual
stock are most familiar, so he tends to pass too quickly over the new
matters which are presented to him, assimilating the details to the
old schemes of his habit. It is most important to observe this
distinction, since it is analogous to the "fluid attention" of the
motor scholar; and some of the very important questions regarding
correlation of studies, the training of attention, and the stimulation
of interest depend upon its recognition. _Acquisition best just where
it is most likely to go wrong_; that is the state of things. The
voluntary use of the visual function gives the best results; but the
habitual, involuntary, slipshod use of it gives bad results, and tends
to the formation of injurious habits.
For example, I set a strongly visual boy a "copy" to draw. Seeing this
visual copy he will quickly recognise it, take it to be very easy,
dash it off quickly, all under the lead of habit; but his result is
poor, because his habit has taken the place of effort. Once get him to
make effort upon it, however, and his will be the best result of all
the scholars, perhaps, just because the task calls him out in the line
of his favoured function. The same antithesis comes out in connection
with other varieties of sensory scholars.
We may say, therefore, in regard to two of the general aspects of
mental types--the relation of the favoured function to attention, on
the one hand, and to habit, on the other--that they both find emphatic
illustration in the pupil of the visual type. He is, more than any
other sensory pupil, a special case. His mental processes set
decidedly toward vision. He is the more important, also, because he is
so common. Statistics are lacking, but possibly half of the entire
human family in civilized life are visual in their type for most of
the language functions. This is due, no doubt, to the emphasis that
civilization puts upon sight as the means of social acquisition
generally, and to our predominantly visual methods of instruction.
The third fact mentioned is also illustrated by this type; the fact
that mental instruction and derangement may come easily, through the
stress laid upon vision in the person's mental economy. I need not
enlarge upon the different forms of special defect which come through
impairment of sight by central lesion or degeneration of the visual
centers and connections. Suffice it to say that they are very common,
and very difficult of recovery. The visual person is often so
completely a slave to his sight that when that fails either in itself
or through weakness of attention he becomes a wreck off the shore of
the ocean of intellect. When we consider the large proportion just
mentioned of pupils of this type, the care which should be exercised
by the school authorities in the matter of favourable conditions of
light, avoidance of visual fatigue, proper distance-adjustments in all
visual application as regards focus, symmetry, size of objects,
copies, prints, etc., becomes at once sufficiently evident to the
thoughtful teacher, as it should be still earlier to the parent. There
should be a medical examination, by a competent oculist, before the
child goes to school, and regular tests afterward. School examiners
and boards should have qualifications for reporting on the hygienic
conditions of the school as regards lighting. The bright glare of a
neighbouring wall before a window toward which children with weak eyes
face when at their desks may result not only in common defects of
vision but also in resulting mental and moral damage; and the results
are worse to those who depend mainly on vision for the food, drink,
and exercise, so to speak, of their growing minds.
As to the methods of teaching these and also the other sensory pupils,
the indications already given must suffice. The statement of some of
these far-reaching problems of educational psychology, and of the
directions in which their answers are to be sought, exhausts the
purpose of this chapter. In general it may be said that the
recommendations made for the treatment of sensory children at the
earlier stage may be extended to later periods also, and that the
treatment should be, for the most part, in intelligent contrast to
that which the motor pupils receive.
_Language Study._--From this general consideration of the child's
training it becomes evident that the great subjects which are most
useful for discipline in the period of secondary education are the
mathematical studies on the one hand, which exercise the faculty of
abstraction, and the positive sciences, which train the power of
observation and require truth to detail. If we should pursue the
subject into the collegiate period, we should find mental and moral
science, literature, and history coming to their rights. If this be in
the main psychological, we see that language study, as such, should
have no great place in secondary education. The study of grammar, as
has been already said, is very useful in the early periods of
development if taught vocally; it brings the child out in
self-expression, and carries its own correctives, from the fact that
its results are always open to social control. These are, in my mind,
the main functions of the study of language.
What, then, is the justification for devoting ten or twelve years of
the youth's time to study of a dead language, as is commonly done in
the case of Latin? The utility of expression does not enter into it,
and the discipline of truth to elegant literary copy can be even so
well attained from the study of our own tongue, which is lamentably
neglected. In all this dreary language study, the youth's interest is
dried up at its source. He is fed on formulas and rules; he has no
outlet for invention or discovery; lists of exceptions to the rules
destroy the remnant of his curiosity and incentive; even reasoning
from analogy is strictly forbidden him; he is shut up from Nature as
in a room with no windows; the dictionary is his authority as absolute
and final as it is flat and sterile. His very industry, being forced
rather than spontaneous, makes him mentally, no less than physically,
stoop-shouldered and near-sighted. It seems to be one of those
mistakes of the past still so well lodged in tradition and class
rivalry that soundness of culture is artificially identified with its
maintenance. Yet there is no reason that the spirit of classical
culture and the durable elements of Greek and Roman life should not be
as well acquired--nay, better--from the study of history, archæology,
and literature. For this language work is not study of literature. Not
one in one hundred of the students who are forced through the
periodical examinations in these languages ever gets any insight into
their æsthetic quality or any inspiration from their form.
But more than this. At least one positively vicious effect follows
from language study with grammar and lexicon, no matter what the
language be. The habit of intellectual guessing grows with the need of
continuous effort in putting together elements which go together for
no particular reason. When a thing can not be reasoned out, it may
just as well be guessed out. The guess is always easier than the
dictionary, and, if successful, it answers just as well. Moreover, the
teacher has no way of distinguishing the pupil's replies which are due
to the guess from those due to honest work. I venture to say, from
personal experience, that no one who has been through the usual
classical course in college and before it has not more than once
staked his all upon the happy guess at the stubborn author's meaning.
This shallow device becomes a substitute for honest struggle. And it
is more than shallow; to guess is dishonest. It is a servant to
unworthy inertia; and worse, it is a cloak to mental unreadiness and
to conscious moral cowardice. The guess is a bluff to fortune when the
honest gauntlet of ignorance should be thrown down to the issue.
The effects of this show themselves in a habit of mind tolerated in
persons of a literary bent, which is a marked contrast to that
demanded and exemplified by science. I think that much of our literary
impressionism and sentimentalism reveal the guessing habit.
Yet why guess? Why be content with an impression? Why hint of a
"certain this and a certain that" when the "certain," if it mean
anything, commonly means the uncertain? Things worth writing about
should be formulated clearly enough to be understood. Why let the
personal reaction of the individual's feeling suffice? Our youth need
to be told that the guess is immoral, that hypothesis is the servant
of research, that the private impression instructs nobody, that
presentiment is usually wrong, that science is the best antidote to
the fear of ghosts, and that the reply "I guess so" betrays itself,
whether it arise from bravado, from cowardice, or from literary
finesse! I think that the great need of our life is honesty, that the
bulwark of honesty in education is exact knowledge with the scientific
habit of mind, and, furthermore, that the greatest hindrance to these
things is the training which does not, with all the sanctions at its
command, distinguish the real, with its infallible tests, from the
shadowy and vague, but which contents itself with the throw of the
intellectual dice box. Any study which tends to make the difference
between truth and error pass with the throwing of a die, and which
leads the student to be content with a result he can not verify, has
somewhat the function in his education of the puzzle in our society
amusements or the game of sliced animals in the nursery.