some habit that in turn is finally based upon an original instinct.
It does not follow that all instincts are of equal value, or that we
do not inherit many instincts which need transformation, rather than
satisfaction, in order to be useful in life. But the instincts which
find their conscious outlet and expression in occupation are bound to
be of an exceedingly fundamental and permanent type. The activities of
life are of necessity directed to bringing the materials and forces of
nature under the control of our purposes; of making them tributary to
ends of life. Men have had to work in order to live. In and through
their work they have mastered nature, they have protected and enriched
the conditions of their own life, they have been awakened to the sense
of their own powers—have been led to invent, to plan, and to rejoice
in the acquisition of skill. In a rough way, all occupations may be
classified as gathering about man’s fundamental relations to the world in
which he lives through getting food to maintain life; securing clothing
and shelter to protect and ornament it, and thus, finally, to provide a
permanent home in which all the higher and more spiritual interests may
center. It is hardly unreasonable to suppose that interests which have
such a history behind them must be of the worthy sort.
However, these interests as they develop in the child not only
recapitulate past important activities of the race, but reproduce those
of the child’s present environment. He continually sees his elders
engaged in such pursuits. He daily has to do with things which are the
results of just such occupations. He comes in contact with facts that
have no meaning, except in reference to them. Take these things out of
the present social life and see how little would remain—and this not
only on the material side, but as regards intellectual, aesthetic, and
moral activities, for these are largely and necessarily bound up with
occupations. The child’s instinctive interests in this direction are,
therefore, constantly reinforced by what he sees, feels, and hears going
on around him. Suggestions along this line are continually coming to
him; motives are awakened; his energies are stirred to action. Again,
it is not unreasonable to suppose that interests which are touched so
constantly, and on so many sides, belong to the worthy and enduring type.
In the third place, one of the objections made against the principle
of interest in education is that it tends to disintegration of mental
economy by constantly stirring up the child in this way or that,
destroying continuity and thoroughness. But an occupation (such as the
textile one herewith reported on) is of necessity a continuous thing. It
lasts, not only for days, but for months and years. It represents, not
a stirring of isolated and superficial energies, but rather a steady,
continuous organization of power along certain general lines. The same
is true, of course, of any other form of occupation, such as shopwork
with tools, or as cooking. The occupations articulate a vast variety of
impulses, otherwise separate and spasmodic, into a consistent skeleton
with a firm backbone. It may well be doubted whether, wholly apart from
some such regular and progressive modes of action, extending as cores
throughout the entire school, it would be permanently safe to give the
principle of “interest” any large place in school work.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION
VII
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION
The subprimary or kindergarten department is undertaking the pedagogical
problems growing out of an attempt to connect kindergarten work
intimately with primary, and to readapt traditional materials and
technique to meet present social conditions and our present physiological
and psychological knowledge. A detailed statement of the work will be
published later.
Little children have their observations and thoughts mainly directed
toward people: what they do, how they behave, what they are occupied
with, and what comes of it. Their interest is of a personal rather than
of an objective or intellectual sort. Its intellectual counterpart
is the story-form; not the task, consciously defined end, or
problem—meaning by story-form something psychical, the holding together
of a variety of persons, things, and incidents through a common idea
that enlists feeling; not an outward relation or tale. Their minds
seek wholes, varied through episode, enlivened with action and defined
in salient features—there must be go, movement, the sense of use and
operation—inspection of things separated from the idea by which they
are carried. Analysis of isolated detail of form and structure neither
appeals nor satisfies.
Material provided by existing social occupations is calculated to
meet and feed this attitude. In previous years the children have been
concerned with the occupations of the home, and the contact of homes
with one another and with outside life. Now they may take up typical
occupations of society at large—a step farther removed from the child’s
egoistic, self-absorbed interest, and yet dealing with something personal
and something which touches him.
From the standpoint of educational theory, the following features may be
noted:
1. The study of natural objects, processes, and relations is placed in a
human setting. During the year, a considerably detailed observation of
seeds and their growth, of plants, woods, stones, animals, as to some
phases of structure and habit, of geographical conditions of landscape,
climate, arrangement of land and water, is undertaken. The pedagogical
problem is to direct the child’s power of observation, to nurture his
sympathetic interest in characteristic traits of the world in which he
lives, to afford interpreting material for later more special studies,
and yet to supply a carrying medium for the variety of facts and ideas
through the dominant spontaneous emotions and thoughts of the child.
Hence their association with human life. Absolutely no separation is
made between the “social” side of the work, its concern with people’s
activities and their mutual dependencies, and the “science,” regard for
physical facts and forces—because the conscious distinction between man
and nature is the result of later reflection and abstraction, and to
force it upon the child here is not only to fail to engage his whole
mental energy, but to confuse and distract him. The environment is always
that in which life is situated and through which it is circumstanced; and
to isolate it, to make it with little children an object of observation
and remark by itself, is to treat human nature inconsiderately. At last,
the original open and free attitude of the mind to nature is destroyed;
nature has been reduced to a mass of meaningless details.
In its emphasis upon the “concrete” and “individual,” modern pedagogical
theory often loses sight of the fact that the existence and presentation
of an individual physical thing—a stone, an orange, a cat—is no guaranty
of _concreteness_; that this is a psychological affair, whatever appeals
to the mind as a whole, as a self-sufficient center of interest and
attention. The reaction from this external and somewhat dead standpoint
often assumes, however, that the needed clothing with human significance
can come only by direct personification, and we have that continued
symbolization of a plant, cloud, or rain which makes only pseudo-science
possible; which, instead of generating love for nature itself, switches
interest to certain sensational and emotional accompaniments, and leaves
it, at last, dissipated and burnt out. And even the tendency to approach
nature through the medium of literature, the pine tree through the fable
of the discontented pine, etc., while recognizing the need of the human
association, fails to note that there is a more straightforward road
from mind to the object—direct through connection with life itself;
and that the poem and story, the literary statement, have their place
as reinforcements and idealizations, not as foundation stones. What is
wanted, in other words, is not to fix up a connection of child mind and
nature, but to give free and effective play to the connection already
operating.
2. This suggests at once the practical questions that are usually
discussed under the name of “correlation,” questions of such interaction
of the various matters studied and powers under acquisition as will
avoid waste and maintain unity of mental growth. From the standpoint
adopted the problem is one of differentiation rather than of correlation
as ordinarily understood. The unity of life, as it presents itself to
the child, binds together and carries along the different occupations,
the diversity of plants, animals, and geographic conditions; drawing,
modeling, games, constructive work, numerical calculations are ways of
carrying certain features of it to mental and emotional satisfaction
and completeness. Not much attention is paid in this year to reading
and writing; but it is obvious that if this were regarded as desirable,
the same principle would apply. It is the community and continuity of
the subject-matter that organizes, that correlates; correlation is
not through devices of instruction which the teacher employs in tying
together things in themselves disconnected.
3. Two recognized demands of primary education are often, at present,
not unified or are even opposed. The need of the familiar, the already
experienced, as a basis for moving upon the unknown and remote, is a
commonplace. The claims of the child’s imagination as a factor is at
least beginning to be recognized. The problem is to work these two forces
together, instead of separately. The child is too often given drill upon
familiar objects and ideas under the sanction of the first principle,
while he is introduced with equal directness to the weird, strange, and
impossible to satisfy the claims of the second. The result, it is hardly
too much to say, is a twofold failure. There is no special connection
between the unreal, the myth, the fairy tale, and the play of mental
imagery. Imagination is not a matter of an impossible subject-matter,
but a constructive way of dealing with any subject-matter under the
influence of a pervading idea. The point is not to dwell with wearisome
iteration upon the familiar and under the guise of object-lessons to
keep the senses directed at material which they have already made
acquaintance with, but to enliven and illumine the ordinary, commonplace,
and homely by using it to build up and appreciate situations previously
unrealized and alien. And this also is culture of imagination. Some
writers appear to have the impression that the child’s imagination has
outlet only in myth and fairy tale of ancient time and distant place or
in weaving egregious fabrications regarding sun, moon, and stars; and
have even pleaded for a mythical investiture of all “science”—as a way
of satisfying the dominating imagination of the child. But fortunately
these things are exceptions, are intensifications, are relaxations of the
average child; not his pursuits. The John and Jane that most of us know
let their imaginations play about the current and familiar contacts and
events of life—about father and mother and friend, about steamboats and
locomotives, and sheep and cows, about the romance of farm and forest, of
seashore and mountain. What is needed, in a word, is to afford occasion
by which the child is moved to educe and exchange with others his store
of experiences, his range of information, to make new observations
correcting and extending them in order to keep his images moving,
in order to find mental rest and satisfaction in definite and vivid
realization of what is new and enlarging.
With the development of reflective attention come the need and the
possibility of a change in the mode of the child’s instruction. In the
previous paragraphs we have been concerned with the direct, spontaneous
attitude that marks the child till into his seventh year—his demand
for new experiences and his desire to complete his partial experiences
by building up images and expressing them in play. This attitude is
typical of what writers call spontaneous attention, or, as some say,
non-voluntary attention.
The child is simply absorbed in what he is doing; the occupation in which
he is engaged lays complete hold upon him. He gives himself without
reserve. Hence, while there is much energy spent, there is no _conscious_
effort; while the child is intent to the point of engrossment, there is
no _conscious_ intention.
With the development of a sense of more remote ends, and of the need
of directing acts so as to make them means for these ends (a matter
discussed in the second number), we have the transition to what is termed
indirect, or, as some writers prefer to say, voluntary, attention. A
result is imaged, and the child attends to what is before him or what
he is immediately doing because it helps to secure the result. Taken by
itself, the object or the act might be indifferent or even repulsive.
But because it is felt to belong to something desirable or valuable, it
borrows the latter’s attracting and holding power.
This is the transition to “voluntary” attention, but only the transition.
The latter comes fully into being only when the child entertains results
in the form of problems or questions, the solution of which he is to
seek for himself. In the intervening stage (in the child from eight to,
say, eleven or twelve), while the child directs a series of intervening
activities on the basis of some end he wishes to reach, this end is
something to be done or made, or some tangible result to be reached; the
problem is a practical difficulty, rather than an intellectual question.
But with growing power the child can conceive of the end as something to
be found out, discovered; and can control his acts and images so as to
help in the inquiry and solution. This is reflective attention proper.
In history work there is change from the story and biography form, from
discussion of questions that arise, to the formulation of questions.
Points about which difference of opinion is possible, matters upon which
experience, reflection, etc., can be brought to bear, are always coming
up in history. But to use the discussion to develop this matter of
doubt and difference into a definite problem, to bring the child to feel
just what the difficulty is, and then throw him upon his own resources
in looking up material bearing upon the point, and upon his judgment in
bringing it to bear, or getting a solution, is a marked intellectual
advance. So in the science there is a change from the practical attitude
of making and using cameras to the consideration of the problems
intellectually involved in this—to principles of light, angular
measurements, etc., which give the theory or explanation of the practice.
In general, this growth is a natural process. But the proper recognition
and use of it is perhaps the most serious problem in instruction upon
the intellectual side. A person who has gained the power of reflective
attention, the power to hold problems, questions, before the mind,
_is_ in so far, intellectually speaking, educated. He has mental
discipline—power _of_ the mind and _for_ the mind. Without this the
mind remains at the mercy of custom and external suggestions. Some of
the difficulties may be barely indicated by referring to an error that
almost dominates instruction of the usual type. Too often it is assumed
that attention can be given directly to any subject-matter, if only the
proper will or disposition be at hand, failure being regarded as a sign
of unwillingness or indocility. Lessons in arithmetic, geography, and
grammar are put before the child, and he is told to attend in order to
learn. But excepting as there is some question, some doubt, present in
the mind as a _basis_ for this attention, _reflective_ attention is
impossible. If there is sufficient _intrinsic_ interest in the material,
there will be direct or spontaneous attention, which is excellent so far
as it goes, but which merely of itself does not give power of thought or
internal mental control. If there is not an inherent attracting power
in the material, then (according to his temperament and training, and
the precedents and expectations of the school) the teacher will either
attempt to surround the material with foreign attractiveness, making a
bid or offering a bribe for attention by “making the lesson interesting”;
or else will resort to counterirritants (low marks, threats of
non-promotion, staying after school, personal disapprobation, expressed
in a great variety of ways, naggings, continuous calling upon the child
to “pay attention,” etc.); or, probably, will use some of both means.
But (1) the attention thus gained is never more than partial, or divided;
and (2) it always remains dependent upon something external—hence, when
the attraction ceases or the pressure lets up, there is little or no gain
in inner or intellectual control. And (3) such attention is always for
the sake of “learning,” i.e., _memorizing ready-made answers to possible
questions to be put by another_. True, reflective attention, on the other
hand, always involves judging, reasoning, deliberation; it means that
the child has a _question of his own_ and is actively engaged in seeking
and selecting relevant material with which to answer it, considering the
bearings and relations of this material—the kind of solution it calls
for. The problem is one’s own; hence also the impetus, the stimulus
to attention, is one’s own; hence also the training secured is one’s
own—it is discipline, or gain in power of control; that is, a _habit_ of
considering problems.
It is hardly too much to say that in the traditional education so much
stress has been laid upon the presentation to the child of ready-made
material (books, object-lessons, teacher’s talks, etc.), and the child
has been so almost exclusively held to bare responsibility for reciting
upon this ready-made material, that there has been only accidental
occasion and motive for developing reflective attention. Next to no
consideration has been paid to the fundamental necessity—leading the
child to realize a problem as his own, so that he is self-induced to
attend in order to find out its answer. So completely have the conditions
for securing this self-putting of problems been neglected that the very
idea of voluntary attention has been radically perverted. It is regarded
as measured by unwilling effort—as activity called out by foreign,
and so repulsive, material under conditions of strain, instead of as
self-initiated effort. “Voluntary” is treated as meaning the reluctant
and disagreeable instead of the free, the self-directed, through personal
interest, insight, and power.
THE AIM OF HISTORY IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION
VIII
THE AIM OF HISTORY IN ELEMENTARY EDUCATION
If history be regarded as just the record of the past, it is hard to
see any grounds for claiming that it should play any large rôle in the
curriculum of elementary education. The past is the past, and the dead
may be safely left to bury its dead. There are too many urgent demands in
the present, too many calls over the threshold of the future, to permit
the child to become deeply immersed in what is forever gone by. Not so
when history is considered as an account of the forces and forms of
social life. Social life we have always with us; the distinction of past
and present is indifferent to it. Whether it was lived just here or just
there is a matter of slight moment. It is life for all that; it shows
the motives which draw men together and push them apart, and depicts
what is desirable and what is hurtful. Whatever history may be for the
scientific historian, for the educator it must be an indirect sociology—a
study of society which lays bare its process of becoming and its modes of
organization. Existing society is both too complex and too close to the
child to be studied. He finds no clues into its labyrinth of detail and
can mount no eminence whence to get a perspective of arrangement.
If the aim of historical instruction is to enable the child to appreciate
the values of social life, to see in imagination the forces which favor
and let men’s effective co-operation with one another, to understand
the sorts of character that help on and that hold back, the essential
thing in its presentation is to make it moving, dynamic. History must be
presented, not as an accumulation of results or effects, a mere statement
of what happened, but as a forceful, acting thing. The motives—that is,
the motors—must stand out. To study history is not to amass information,
but to use information in constructing a vivid picture of how and why men
did thus and so; achieved their successes and came to their failures.
When history is conceived as dynamic, as moving, its economic and
industrial aspects are emphasized. These are but technical terms which
express the problem with which humanity is unceasingly engaged; how to
live, how to master and use nature so as to make it tributary to the
enrichment of human life. The great advances in civilization have come
through those manifestations of intelligence which have lifted man from
his precarious subjection to nature, and revealed to him how he may make
its forces co-operate with his own purposes. The social world in which
the child now lives is so rich and full that it is not easy to see how
much it cost, how much effort and thought lie back of it. Man has a
tremendous equipment ready at hand. The child may be led to translate
these ready-made resources into fluid terms; he may be led to see man
face to face with nature, without inherited capital, without tools,
without manufactured materials. And, step by step, he may follow the
processes by which man recognized the needs of his situation, thought out
the weapons and instruments that enable him to cope with them; and may
learn how these new resources opened new horizons of growth and created
new problems. The industrial history of man is not a materialistic or
merely utilitarian affair. It is a matter of intelligence. Its record
is the record of how man learned to think, to think to some effect, to
transform the conditions of life so that life itself became a different
thing. It is an ethical record as well; the account of the conditions
which men have patiently wrought out to serve their ends.
The question of how human beings live, indeed, represents the dominant
interest with which the child approaches historic material. It is this
point of view which brings those who worked in the past close to the
beings with whom he is daily associated, and confers upon him the gift of
sympathetic penetration.
The child who is interested in the way in which men lived, the tools
they had to do with, the new inventions they made, the transformations
of life that arose from the power and leisure thus gained, is eager to
repeat like processes in his own action, to remake utensils, to reproduce
processes, to rehandle materials. Since he understands their problems and
their successes only by seeing what obstacles and what resources they
had from nature, the child is interested in field and forest, ocean and
mountain, plant and animal. By building up a conception of the natural
environment in which lived the people he is studying, he gets his hold
upon their lives. This reproduction he cannot make excepting as he gains
acquaintance with the natural forces and forms with which he is himself
surrounded. The interest in history gives a more human coloring, a
wider significance, to his own study of nature. His knowledge of nature
lends point and accuracy to his study of history. This is the natural
“correlation” of history and science.