Talks to Teachers on Psychology

In 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a few public lectures on psychology to the Cambridge teachers. The talks now printed form the substance of that course, which has since then been delivered at various places to various teacher-audiences. I have found by experience that what my hearers seem least to relish is analytical technicality, and what they most care for is concrete practical application. So I have gradually weeded out the former, and left the latter unreduced; and now, that I have at last written out the lectures, they contain a minimum of what is deemed 'scientific' in psychology, and are practical and popular in the extreme.

Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their heads at this; but in taking my cue from what has seemed to me to be the feeling of the audiences I believe that I am shaping my book so as to satisfy the more genuine public need.

Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions, subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and numbered headings, the variations of type, and all the other mechanical artifices on which they are accustomed to prop their minds. But my main desire has been to make them conceive, and, if possible, reproduce sympathetically in their imagination, the mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself feels it to be. He doesn't chop himself into distinct processes and compartments; and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of my book to make it look, when printed, like a Baedeker's handbook of travel or a text-book of arithmetic. So far as books printed like this book force the fluidity of the facts upon the young teacher's attention, so far I am sure they tend to do his intellect a service, even though they may leave unsatisfied a craving (not altogether without its legitimate grounds) for more nomenclature, head-lines, and subdivisions.

Readers acquainted with my larger books on Psychology will meet much familiar phraseology. In the chapters on habit and memory I have even copied several pages verbatim, but I do not know that apology is needed for such plagiarism as this.

The talks to students, which conclude the volume, were written in response to invitations to deliver 'addresses' to students at women's colleges. The first one was to the graduating class of the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. Properly, it continues the series of talks to teachers. The second and the third address belong together, and continue another line of thought.

I wish I were able to make the second, 'On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,' more impressive. It is more than the mere piece of sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connects itself with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume of philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or individualistic philosophy. According to that philosophy, the truth is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed 'the Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely public and universal. Private and uncommunicable perceptions always remain over, and the worst of it is that those who look for them from the outside never know where.

The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,--is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess.

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., March, 1899. The American educational organization,--What teachers may expect from psychology,--Teaching methods must agree with psychology, but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom,--The science of teaching and the science of war,--The educational uses of psychology defined,--The teacher's duty toward child-study.

II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Our mental life is a succession of conscious 'fields,'--They have a focus and a margin,--This description contrasted with the theory of 'ideas,'--Wundt's conclusions, note.

III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM

Mind as pure reason and mind as practical guide,--The latter view the more fashionable one to-day,--It will be adopted in this work,--Why so?--The teacher's function is to train pupils to behavior.

IV. EDUCATION AND BEHAVIOR

Education defined,--Conduct is always its outcome,--Different national ideals: Germany and England.

V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS

No impression without expression,--Verbal reproduction,--Manual training,--Pupils should know their 'marks'.

VI. NATIVE AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS

The acquired reactions must be preceded by native ones,--Illustration: teaching child to ask instead of snatching,--Man has more instincts than other mammals.

VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE

Fear and love,--Curiosity,--Imitation,--Emulation,--Forbidden by Rousseau,--His error,--Ambition, pugnacity, and pride. Soft pedagogics and the fighting impulse,--Ownership,--Its educational uses,--Constructiveness,--Manual teaching,--Transitoriness in instincts,--Their order of succession.

VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT

Good and bad habits,--Habit due to plasticity of organic tissues,--The aim of education is to make useful habits automatic,--Maxims relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative,--2. No exception,--3. Seize first opportunity to act,--4. Don't preach,--Darwin and poetry: without exercise our capacities decay,--The habit of mental and muscular relaxation,--Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort trained,--Sudden conversions compatible with laws of habit,--Momentous influence of habits on character.

IX. THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS

A case of habit,--The two laws, contiguity and similarity,--The teacher has to build up useful systems of association,--Habitual associations determine character,--Indeterminateness of our trains of association,--We can trace them backward, but not foretell them,--Interest deflects,--Prepotent parts of the field,--In teaching, multiply cues.

X. INTEREST

The child's native interests,--How uninteresting things acquire an interest,--Rules for the teacher,--'Preparation' of the mind for the lesson: the pupil must have something to attend with,--All later interests are borrowed from original ones.

XI. ATTENTION

Interest and attention are two aspects of one fact,--Voluntary attention comes in beats,--Genius and attention,--The subject must change to win attention,--Mechanical aids,--The physiological process,--The new in the old is what excites interest,--Interest and effort are compatible,--Mind-wandering,--Not fatal to mental efficiency.

XII. MEMORY

Due to association,--No recall without a cue,--Memory is due to brain-plasticity,--Native retentiveness,--Number of associations may practically be its equivalent,--Retentiveness is a fixed property of the individual,--Memory versus memories,--Scientific system as help to memory,--Technical memories,--Cramming,--Elementary memory unimprovable,--Utility of verbal memorizing,--Measurements of immediate memory,--They throw little light,--Passion is the important factor in human efficiency,--Eye-memory, ear-memory, etc.,--The rate of forgetting, Ebbinghaus's results,--Influence of the unreproducible,--To remember, one must think and connect.

XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS

Education gives a stock of conceptions,--The order of their acquisition,--Value of verbal material,--Abstractions of different orders: when are they assimilable,--False conceptions of children.

XIV. APPERCEPTION

Often a mystifying idea,--The process defined,--The law of economy,--Old-fogyism,--How many types of apperception?--New heads of classification must continually be invented,--Alteration of the apperceiving mass,--Class names are what we work by,--Few new fundamental conceptions acquired after twenty-five.

XV. THE WILL

The word defined,--All consciousness tends to action,--Ideo-motor action,--Inhibition,--The process of deliberation,--Why so few of our ideas result in acts,--The associationist account of the will,--A balance of impulses and inhibitions,--The over-impulsive and the over-obstructed type,--The perfect type,--The balky will,--What character building consists in,--Right action depends on right apperception of the case,--Effort of will is effort of attention: the drunkard's dilemma,--Vital importance of voluntary attention,--Its amount may be indeterminate,--Affirmation of free-will,--Two types of inhibition,--Spinoza on inhibition by a higher good,--Conclusion.

TALKS TO STUDENTS.

I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION

II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS

III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT?

TALKS TO TEACHERS

I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART