BEHAVIOR
=Behavior in retrospect.=--The caption of this chapter implies the
behavior of human beings, as a matter of course, and the study of this
subject is, at once, both alluring and illusive. No sooner has the
student arrived at deductions that seem conclusive than exceptions begin
to loom up on his speculative horizon that disintegrate his theories and
cause him to retrace the steps of his reasoning. Such a study affords
large scope for introspection, but too few people incline to examine
their own behavior in any mental attitude that approaches the
scientific. The others seem to think that things just happen, and that
their own behavior is fortuitous. They seem not to be able to reason
from effect back to cause, or to realize that there may be any possible
connection between what they are doing at the present moment and what
they were doing twenty years ago.
=Environment.=--In what measure is a man the product of his environment?
To what extent is a man able to influence his environment? These
questions start us on a line of inquiry that leads toward the realm of,
at least, a hypothetical solution of the problem of behavior. After we
have reached the conclusion, by means of concrete examples, that many
men have influenced their environment, it becomes pertinent, at once, to
inquire still further whence these men derived the power thus to modify
their environment. We may not be able to reach final or satisfactory
answers to these questions, but it will, none the less, prove a
profitable exercise. We need not trench upon the theological doctrine of
predestination, but we may, with impunity, speculate upon the
possibility of a doctrine of educational predestination.
=Queries.=--Was Mr. George Goethals predestined to become the engineer
of the Panama Canal from the foundation of the world, or might he have
become a farmer, a physician, or a poet? Could Julius Cæsar have turned
back from the Rubicon and refrained from saying, "The die is cast"?
Could Abraham Lincoln have withheld his pen from the Emancipation
Proclamation and permitted the negro race to continue in slavery? Could
any influence have deterred Walter Scott from writing "Kenilworth"? Was
Robert Fulton's invention of the steamboat inevitable? Could Christopher
Columbus possibly have done otherwise than discover America? Does
education have anything whatever to do in determining what a man will or
will not do?
=Antecedent causes.=--Here sits a man, let us say, who is writing a
musical selection. He works in a veritable frenzy, and all else seems
negligible for the time. He well-nigh disdains food and sleep in the
intensity of his interest. Is this particular episode in his life merely
happening, or does some causative influence lie back of this event
somewhere in the years? Did some influence of home, or school, or
playground give him an impulse and an impetus toward this event? Or, in
other words, are the activities of his earlier life functioning on the
bit of paper before him? If this is an effect, what and where was the
cause? In the case of any type of human behavior can we postulate
antecedent causes? If a hundred musicians were writing musical
compositions at the same moment, would they offer similar explanations
of their behavior?
=Leadership.=--As a working hypothesis, it may be averred that ability
to influence environment betokens leadership. With such a measuring-rod
in hand we may go out into the community and determine, with some degree
of accuracy, who are leaders and who are mere followers. Then we should
need to go further and discover degrees of leadership, whether small or
large, and, also, the quality of the leadership, whether good or bad,
wise or foolish, selfish or altruistic, noisy or serene, and all the
many other variations. Having done all this, we are still only on the
threshold of our study, for we must reason back from our accumulated
facts to their antecedent causes. If we score one man's leadership fifty
and another's eighty, have we any possible warrant for concluding that
the influences in their early life that tend to generate leadership were
approximately as five to eight?
=Restricted concepts.=--This question is certain to encounter
incredulity, just as it is certain to raise other questions. Both
results will be gratifying as showing an awakening of interest, which is
the most and the best that the present discussion can possibly hope to
accomplish. Very many, perhaps most, teachers in the traditional school
do their teaching with reference to the next examination. They remind
their pupils daily of the on-coming examination and remind them of the
dire consequences following their failure to attain the passing grade of
seventy. They ask what answer the pupil would give to a certain question
if it should appear in the examination. If they can somehow get their
pupils to surmount that barrier of seventy at promotion time, they seem
quite willing to turn their backs upon them and let the teacher in the
next grade make what she can of such unprofitable baggage.
=Each lesson a prophecy.=--And we still call this education. It isn't
education at all, but the merest hack work, and the tragedy of it is
that the child is the one to suffer. The teacher goes on her complacent
way happy in the consciousness that her pupils were promoted and,
therefore, she will retain her place on the pay roll. It were more
logical to have the same teacher continue with the pupil during his
entire school life of twelve years, for, in that case, her interest in
him would be continuous rather than temporary and spasmodic. But the
present plan of changing teachers would be even better than that if only
every teacher's work could be made to project itself not only to
graduation day, but to the days of mature manhood and womanhood. If only
every teacher were able to make each lesson a vital prophecy of what the
pupil is to be and to do twenty years hence, then that lesson would
become a condition precedent to the pupil's future behavior.
=Outlook.=--Groping about in the twilight of possibilities we speculate
in a mild and superficial way as to the extent to which heredity,
environment, and education either singly or in combination are
determining factors in human behavior. But when no definite answer is
forthcoming we lose interest in the subject and have recourse to the
traditional methods of our grandfathers. We lose sight of the fact that
in our quest for the solution of this problem we are coming nearer and
nearer to the answer to the perennial question, What is education?
Hence, neither the time nor the effort is wasted that we devote to this
study. We may not understand heredity; we may find ourselves bewildered
by environment; we may not apprehend what education is; but by keeping
all these closely associated with behavior in our thinking we shall be
the gainers.
=Long division ramified.=--We are admonished so to organize the
activities of the school that they may function in behavior. That is an
admonition of stupendous import as we discover when we attempt to
compass the content of behavior. One of the activities of the school is
Long Division. This is relatively simple, but the possible behavior in
which it may function is far less simple. In the past, this same Long
Division has functioned in the Brooklyn Bridge, in the Hoosac Tunnel,
and Washington Monument, in the Simplon Pass, and in Eiffel Tower. It
has helped us to travel up the mountain side on funicular railways,
underneath rivers and cities by means of subways, under the ocean in
submarines, and in the air by means of aircraft, and over the tops of
cities on elevated railways. Only the prophet would have the temerity to
predict what further achievements the future holds in store. But all
that has been done and all that will yet be done are only a part of the
behavior in which this activity functions.
=Behavior amplified.=--Human behavior runs the entire gamut, from the
bestial to the sublime, with all the gradations between. It has to do
with the mean thief who pilfers the petty treasures of the little child,
and with the high-minded philanthropist who walks and works in obedience
to the behests of altruism. It includes the frowzy slattern who offends
the sight and also the high-born lady of quality whose presence exhales
and, therefore, inspires to, refinement and grace. It has to do with the
coarse boor who defiles with his person and his speech and the courtly,
cultured gentleman who becomes the exemplar of those who come under his
influence. It touches the depraved gamin of the alley and the celebrated
scholar whose pen and voice shed light and comfort. It concerns itself
with the dark lurking places of the prowlers of the night who prey upon
innocence, virtue, and prosperity and with the cultured home whose
members make and glorify civilization.
=Its scope.=--It swings through the mighty arc, from the anarchist
plotting devastation and death up to Socrates inciting his friends to
good courage as he drinks the hemlock. It takes cognizance of the slave
in his cabin no less than of Lincoln in his act of setting the slaves
free. It touches the extremes in Mrs. Grundy and Clara Barton. It
concerns itself with Medea scattering the limbs of her murdered brother
along the way to delay her pursuers and with Antigone performing the
rites of burial over the body of her brother that his soul might live
forever. It has to do with Circe, who transformed men into pigs, and
with Frances Willard, who sought to restore lost manhood. It includes
all that pertains to Lucrezia Borgia and Mary Magdalene; Nero and
Phillips Brooks; John Wilkes Booth and Nathan Hale; Becky Sharp and
Evangeline; Goneril and Cordelia; and Benedict Arnold and George
Washington.
=Behavior in history.=--Before the teacher can win a starting-point in
her efforts to organize the activities of her school in such a manner
that they may function in behavior, she must have a pretty clear notion
as to what behavior really is. To gain this comprehensive notion she
must review in her thinking the events that make up history. In the
presence of each one of these events she must realize that this is the
behavior in which antecedent activities functioned. Then she will be
free to speculate upon the character of those activities, what
modifications, accretions, or abrasions they experienced in passing from
the place of their origin to the event before her, and whether like
activities in another place or another age would function in a similar
event. She need not be discouraged if she finds no adequate answer, for
she will be the better teacher because of the speculation, even lacking
a definite answer.
=Machinery.=--She must challenge every piece of machinery that meets her
gaze with the question "Whence camest thou?" She knows, in a vague way,
that it is the product of mind, but she needs to know more. She needs to
know that the machine upon which she is looking did not merely happen,
but that it has a history as fascinating as any romance if only she
cause it to give forth a revelation of itself. She may find in tracing
the evolution of the plow that the original was the forefinger of some
cave man, in the remote past. For a certainty, she will find, lurking
in some machine, in some form, the multiplication table, and this fact
will form an interesting nexus between behavior in the form of the
machine and the activities of the school. She will be delighted to learn
that no machine was ever constructed without the aid of the
multiplication table, and when she is teaching this table thereafter she
does the work with keener zest, knowing that it may function in another
machine.
=Art.=--When she looks at the "Captive Andromache" by Leighton she is
involved in a network of speculations. She wonders by what devious ways
the mind of the artist had traveled in reaching this type and example of
behavior. She wonders whether the artistic impulse was born in him or
whether it was acquired. She sees that he knew his Homer and she would
be glad to know just how his reading of the "Iliad" had come to function
in this particular picture. She further wonders what lessons in drawing
and painting the artist had had in the schools that finally culminated
in this masterpiece, and whether any of his classmates ever achieved
distinction as artists. She wonders, too, whether there is an embryo
artist in her class and what she ought to do in the face of that
possibility. Again she wonders how geography, grammar, and spelling can
be made to function in such a painting as Rosa Bonheur's "The Plough
Oxen," and her wonder serves to invest these subjects with new meaning
and power.
=Shakespeare.=--In the school at Stratford they pointed out to her the
desk at which Shakespeare sat as a lad, with all its boyish
hieroglyphics, and her thought instinctively leaped across the years to
"The Tempest," "King Lear," and "Hamlet." She pondered deeply the
relation between the activities of the lad and the behavior of the man,
wondering how much the school had to do with the plays that stand alone
in literature, and whether he imbibed the power from associations, from
books, from people, or from his ancestors. She wondered what magic
ingredient had been dropped into the activities of his life that had
proven the determining factor in the plays that set him apart among men.
She realizes that his behavior was distinctive, and she fain would
discover the talisman whose potent influence determined the bent and
power of his mind. And she wonders, again, whether any pupil in her
school may ever exemplify such behavior.
=History.=--When she reads her history she has a keener, deeper, and
wider interest than ever before, for she now realizes that every event
of history is an effect, whose inciting causes lie back in the years,
and is not fortuitous as she once imagined. She realizes that the
historical event may have been the convergence of many lines of thinking
emanating from widely divergent sources, and this conception serves to
make her interest more acute. In thus reasoning from effect back to
cause she gains the ability to reason from cause to effect and,
therefore, her teaching of history becomes far more vital. She is
studying the philosophy of history and not a mere catalogue of isolated
and unrelated facts. History is a great web, and in the events she sees
the pattern that minds have worked. She is more concerned now with the
reactions of her pupils to this pattern than she is with mere names and
dates, for these reactions give her a clew to tendencies on the part of
her pupils that may lead to results of vast import.
=Poetry.=--In every poem she reads she finds an illustration of mental
and spiritual behavior, and she fain would find the key that will
discover the mental operations that conditioned the form of the poem.
She would hark back to the primal impulse of each bit of imagery, and
she analyzes and appraises each word and line with the zeal and skill of
a connoisseur. She would estimate justly and accurately the activities
that functioned in this sort of behavior. She seeks for the influences
of landscapes, of sky, of birds, of sunsets, of clouds,--in short, of
all nature, as well as of the manifestations of the human soul. Thus the
teacher gains access into the very heart of nature and life and can thus
cause the poem to become a living thing to her pupils. In all literature
she is ever seeking for the inciting causes; for only so can she prove
an inspiring guide and counselor in pointing to them the way toward
worthy achievements.
=Attitude of teacher.=--In conclusion, then, we may readily distinguish
the vitalized teacher from the traditional teacher by her attitude
toward the facts set down in the books. The traditional teacher looks
upon them as mere facts to be noted, connoted, memorized, reproduced,
and graded, whereas the vitalized teacher regards them as types of
behavior, as ultimate effects of mental and spiritual activities. The
traditional teacher knows that seven times nine are sixty-three, and
that is quite enough for her purpose. If the pupil recites the fact
correctly, she gives him a perfect grade and recommends him for
promotion. For the vitalized teacher the bare fact is not enough. She
does not disdain or neglect the mechanics of her work, but she sees
beyond the present. She sees this same fact merging into the operations
of algebra, geometry, trigonometry, calculus, physics, and engineering,
until it finally functions in some enterprise that redounds to the
well-being of humanity.
=Conclusion.=--To her every event of history, every fact of mathematics
and science, every line of poetry, every passage of literature is
pregnant with meaning, dynamic, vibrant, dramatic, and prophetic.
Nothing can be dull or prosaic to her electric touch. All the facts of
the books, all the emotions of life, and all the beauties of nature she
weaves into the fabric of her dreams for her pupils. The goal of her
aspirations is far ahead, and around this goal she sees clustered those
who were her pupils. In every recitation this goal looms large in her
vision. She can envisage the viewpoint of her pupils, and thus strives
to have them envisage hers. She yearns to have them join with her in
looking down through the years when the activities of the school will be
functioning in worthy behavior.
QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES
1. Discuss the relative importance of environment as a factor in the
behavior of plants; animals; children; men.
2. How may an understanding of the mutual reaction of the child and his
environment assist the teacher in planning for character building in
pupils?
3. Make specific suggestions by which children may influence their
environment.
4. Discuss the vitalized teacher's contribution to the environment of
the child.
5. After reading this chapter give your definition of "behavior."
6. Discuss the author's idea of leadership.
7. Define education in terms of behavior, environment, and heredity.
8. Account for the difference in behavior of some of the characters
mentioned in the chapter.
9. How may the vitalized teacher be distinguished from the traditional
teacher in her attitude toward facts?
10. Discuss the doctrine of educational predestination.