The school practice of today has a definite
psychological basis. Teachers are already
possessed by specific psychological assumptions
which control their theory and their
practice. The greatest obstacle to the introduction
of certain educational reforms is precisely
the permeating persistence of the
underlying psychological creed. Traced back
to its psychological ultimates, there are two
controlling bases of existing methods of instruction.
One is the assumption of a fundamental
distinction between child psychology
[pg 10]
and the adult psychology where in reality
identity reigns, viz., in the region of the motives
and conditions which make for mental
power. The other is the assumption of likeness
where marked difference is the feature
most significant for educational purposes; I
mean the specialization of aims and habits in
the adult, compared with the absence of specialization
in the child, and the connection of
undifferentiated status with the full and free
growth of the child.
The adult is primarily a person with a certain
calling and position in life. These devolve
upon him certain specific responsibilities which
he has to meet, and call into play certain
formed habits. The child is primarily one
whose calling is growth. He is concerned with
arriving at specific ends and purposes—instead
of having a general framework already
developed. He is engaged in forming habits
rather than in definitely utilizing those already
formed. Consequently he is absorbed in getting
that all-around contact with persons and
things, that range of acquaintance with the
physical and ideal factors of life, which shall
afford the background and material for the
specialized aims and pursuits of later life. He
is, or should be, busy in the formation of a
flexible variety of habits whose sole immediate
[pg 11]
criterion is their relation to full growth, rather
than in acquiring certain skills whose value is
measured by their reference to specialized
technical accomplishments. This is the radical
psychological and biological distinction, I
take it, between the child and the adult. It is
because of this distinction that children are
neither physiologically nor mentally describable
as "little men and women."
The full recognition of this distinction means
of course the selection and arrangement of all
school materials and methods for the facilitation
of full normal growth, trusting to the result
in growth to provide the instrumentalities
of later specialized adaptation. If education
means the period of prolonged infancy, it
means nothing less than this. But look at our
school system and ask whether the three R's
are taught, either as to subject-matter or as to
method, with reference to growth, to its present
demands and opportunities; or as technical
acquisitions which are to be needed in the
specialized life of the adult. Ask the same
questions about geography, grammar, and history.
The gap between psychological theory
and the existing school practice becomes painfully
apparent. We readily realize the extent
to which the present school system is
dominated by carrying over into child life a
[pg 12]
standpoint and method which are significant
in the psychology of the adult.
The narrow scope of the traditional elementary
curriculum, the premature and excessive
use of logical analytic methods, the assumption
of ready-made faculties of observation,
memory, attention, etc., which can be brought
into play if only the child chooses to do so,
the ideal of formal discipline—all these find a
large measure of their explanation in neglect
of just this psychological distinction between
the child and the adult. The hold of these
affairs upon the school is so fixed that it is
impossible to shake it in any fundamental
way, excepting by a thorough appreciation of
the actual psychology of the case. This appreciation
cannot be confined to the educational
leaders and theorists. No individual instructor
can be sincere and whole-hearted, to say nothing
of intelligent, in carrying into effect the
needed reforms, save as he genuinely understands
the scientific basis and necessity of the
change.
But in another direction there is the assumption
of a fundamental difference: namely,
as to the conditions which secure intellectual
and moral progress and power.[2] No one
[pg 13]
seriously questions that, with an adult, power
and control are obtained through realization of
personal ends and problems, through personal
selection of means and materials which are
relevant, and through personal adaptation and
application of what is thus selected, together
with whatever of experimentation and of testing
is involved in this effort. Practically every
one of these three conditions of increase in
power for the adult is denied for the child.
For him problems and aims are determined by
another mind. For him the material that is
relevant and irrelevant is selected in advance
by another mind. And, upon the whole, there
is such an attempt to teach him a ready-made
method for applying his material to the solution
of his problems, or the reaching of his
ends, that the factor of experimentation is reduced
to the minimum. With the adult we
unquestioningly assume that an attitude of
personal inquiry, based upon the possession
of a problem which interests and absorbs, is
a necessary precondition of mental growth.
With the child we assume that the precondition
is rather the willing disposition which
makes him ready to submit to any problem
and material presented from without. Alertness
is our ideal in one case; docility in the
other. With one we assume that power of
[pg 14]
attention develops in dealing with problems
which make a personal appeal, and through
personal responsibility for determining what is
relevant. With the other we provide next to
no opportunities for the evolution of problems
out of immediate experience, and allow next
to no free mental play for selecting, assorting,
and adapting the experiences and ideas that
make for their solution. How profound a revolution
in the position and service of text-book
and teacher, and in methods of instruction depending
therefrom, would be effected by a sincere
recognition of the psychological identity
of child and adult in these respects can with
difficulty be realized.
Here again it is not enough that the educational
commanders should be aware of the
correct educational psychology. The rank and
file, just because they are persons dealing with
persons, must have a sufficient grounding in
the psychology of the matter to realize the
necessity and the significance of what they are
doing. Any reform instituted without such
conviction on the part of those who have to
carry it into effect would never be undertaken
in good faith, nor in the spirit which its ideal
inevitably demands; consequently it could lead
only to disaster.
At this point, however, the issue defines
[pg 15]
itself somewhat more narrowly. It may be
true, it is true, we are told, that some should
take hold of psychological methods and conclusions,
and organize them with reference to
the assistance which they may give to the cause
of education. But this is not the work of the
teacher. It belongs to the general educational
theorist: the middleman between the psychologist
and the educational practitioner. He
should put the matter into such shape that the
teacher may take the net results in the form
of advice and rules for action; but the teacher
who comes in contact with the living personalities
must not assume the psychological attitude.
If he does, he reduces persons to objects,
and thereby distorts, or rather destroys, the
ethical relationship which is the vital nerve of
instruction (Psychology and Life, p. 122, and
pp. 136–8).
That there is some legitimate division of
labor between the general educational theorist
and the actual instructor, there is, of course,
no doubt. As a rule, it will not be the one
actively employed in instruction who will be
most conscious of the psychological basis and
equivalents of the educational work, nor most
occupied in finding the pedagogical rendering
of psychological facts and principles. Of
necessity, the stress of interest will be elsewhere.
[pg 16]
But we have already found reason for
questioning the possibility of making the
somewhat different direction of interest into a
rigid dualism of a legislative class on one side
and an obedient subject class on the other.
Can the teacher ever receive "obligatory prescriptions"?
Can he receive from another a
statement of the means by which he is to reach
his ends, and not become hopelessly servile in
his attitude? Would not such a result be even
worse than the existing mixture of empiricism
and inspiration?—just because it would forever
fossilize the empirical element and dispel
the inspiration which now quickens routine.
Can a passive, receptive attitude on the part
of the instructor (suggesting the soldier awaiting
orders from a commanding general) be
avoided, unless the teacher, as a student of
psychology, himself sees the reasons and import
of the suggestions and rules that are
proffered him?
I quote a passage that seems of significance:
"Do we not lay a special linking science
everywhere else between the theory and practical
work? We have engineering between
physics and the practical workingmen in the
mills; we have a scientific medicine between
the natural science and the physician" (p. 138).
The sentences suggest, in an almost
[pg 17]
startling way, that the real essence of the
problem is found in an organic connection between
the two extreme terms—between the
theorist and the practical worker—through
the medium of the linking science. The decisive
matter is the extent to which the ideas
of the theorist actually project themselves,
through the kind offices of the middleman,
into the consciousness of the practitioner. It
is the participation by the practical man in
the theory, through the agency of the linking
science, that determines at once the effectiveness
of the work done, and the moral freedom
and personal development of the one
engaged in it. It is because the physician no
longer follows rules, which, however rational
in themselves, are yet arbitrary to him (because
grounded in principles that he does not
understand), that his work is becoming liberal,
attaining the dignity of a profession, instead
of remaining a mixture of empiricism and quackery.
It is because, alas, engineering makes
only a formal and not a real connection between
physics and the practical workingmen
in the mills that our industrial problem is an
ethical problem of the most serious kind.
The question of the amount of wages the
laborer receives, of the purchasing value of
this wage, of the hours and conditions of
[pg 18]
labor, are, after all, secondary. The problem
primarily roots in the fact that the mediating
science does not connect with his consciousness,
but merely with his outward actions. He does
not appreciate the significance and bearing of
what he does; and he does not perform his
work because of sharing in a larger scientific
and social consciousness. If he did, he would
be free. All other proper accompaniments of
wage, and hours, healthful and inspiring conditions,
would be added unto him, because he
would have entered into the ethical kingdom.
Shall we seek analogy with the teacher's calling
in the workingmen in the mill, or in the
scientific physician?
It is quite likely that I shall be reminded
that I am overlooking an essential difference.
The physician, it will be said, is dealing with
a body which either is in itself a pure object,
a causal interplay of anatomical elements, or is
something which lends itself naturally and
without essential loss to treatment from this
point of view; while the case is quite different
in the material with which the teacher deals.
Here is personality, which is destroyed when
regarded as an object. But the gap is not so
pronounced nor so serious as this objection
implies. The physician, after all, is not dealing
with a lifeless body; with a simple anatomical
[pg 19]
structure, or interplay of mechanical
elements. Life-functions, active operations, are
the reality which confronts him. We do not
have to go back many centuries in the history
of medicine to find a time when the physician
attempted to deal with these functions directly
and immediately. They were so overpoweringly
present, they forced themselves upon
him so obviously and so constantly, that he
had no resource save a mixture of magic and
empiricism: magic so far as he followed methods
derived from uncritical analogy, or from
purely general speculation on the universe and
life; empiricism so long as he just followed
procedures which had been found helpful
before in cases which somewhat resembled the
present. We have only to trace the intervening
history of medicine to appreciate that it is
precisely the ability to state function in terms
of structure, to reduce life in its active operations
to terms of a causal mechanism, which
has taken the medical calling out of this dependence
upon a vibration between superstition
and routine. Progress has come by taking
what is really an activity as if it were only an
object. It is the capacity to effect this transformation
of life-activity which measures both
the scientific character of the physician's procedure
and his practical control, the certainty
[pg 20]
and efficacy of what he, as a living man, does
in relation to some other living man.
It is an old story, however, that we must
not content ourselves with analogies. We
must find some specific reason in the principles
of the teacher's own activities for believing
that psychology—the ability to transform
a living personality into an objective mechanism
for the time being—is not merely an incidental
help, but an organic necessity. Upon
the whole, the best efforts of teachers at present
are partly paralyzed, partly distorted, and
partly rendered futile precisely from the fact
that they are in such immediate contact with
sheer, unanalyzed personality. The relation is
such a purely ethical and personal one that the
teacher cannot get enough outside the situation
to handle it intelligently and effectively.
He is in precisely the condition in which the
physician was when he had no recourse save to
deal with health as entity or force on one side,
and disease as opposing agency or invading
influence upon the other. The teacher reacts
>en bloc, in a gross wholesale way, to something
which he takes in an equally undefined and total
way in the child. It is the inability to regard,
upon occasion, both himself and the
child as just objects working upon each other
in specific ways that compels him to resort to
[pg 21]
purely arbitrary measures, to fall back upon
mere routine traditions of school-teaching, or
to fly to the latest fad of pedagogical theorists—the
latest panacea peddled out in school
journals or teachers' institutes—just as the old
physician relied upon his magic formula.
I repeat, it is the fundamental weakness of
our teaching force today (putting aside teachers
who are actually incompetent by reason
either of wrong motives or inadequate preparation)
that they react in gross to the
child's exhibitions in gross without analyzing
them into their detailed and constituent elements.
If the child is angry, he is dealt with
simply as an angry being; anger is an entity,
a force, not a symptom. If a child is inattentive,
this again is treated as a mere case of
refusal to use the faculty or function of attention,
of sheer unwillingness to act. Teachers
tell you that a child is careless or inattentive
in the same final way in which they would tell
you that a piece of paper is white. It is just a
fact, and that is all there is of it. Now, it is
only through some recognition of attention as a
mechanism, some awareness of the interplay of
sensations, images, and motor impulses which
constitute it as an objective fact, that the
teacher can deal effectively with attention as a
function. And, of course, the same is true of
[pg 22]
memory, quick and useful observation, good
judgment, and all the other practical powers
the teacher is attempting to cultivate.
Consideration of the abstract concepts of
mechanism and personality is important. Too
much preoccupation with them in a general
fashion, however, without translation into relevant
imagery of actual conditions, is likely to
give rise to unreal difficulties. The ethical
personality does not go to school naked; it
takes with it the body as the instrument through
which all influences reach it, and through control
of which its ideas are both elaborated and
expressed. The teacher does not deal with
personality at large, but as expressed in intellectual
and practical impulses and habits. The
ethical personality is not formed—it is forming.
The teacher must provide stimuli leading
to the equipment of personality with active
habits and interests. When we consider the
problem of forming habits and interests, we find
ourselves at once confronted with matters of
this sort: What stimuli shall be presented to
the sense-organs and how? What stable complexes
of associations shall be organized?
What motor impulses shall be evoked, and to
what extent? How shall they be induced in
such a way as to bring favorable stimuli under
greater control, and to lessen the danger of
[pg 23]
excitation from undesirable stimuli? In a
word, the teacher is dealing with the psychical
factors that are concerned with furtherance of
certain habits, and the inhibition of others—habits
intellectual, habits emotional, habits in
overt action.
Moreover, all the instruments and materials
with which the teacher deals must be considered
as psychical stimuli. Such consideration
involves of necessity a knowledge of their reciprocal
reactions—of what goes by the name
of causal mechanism. The introduction of certain
changes into a network of associations,
the reinforcement of certain sensori-motor connections,
the weakening or displacing of others—this
is the psychological rendering of the
greater part of the teacher's actual business.
It is not that one teacher employs mechanical
considerations, and that the other does not,
appealing to higher ends; it is that one does
not know his mechanism, and consequently
acts servilely, superstitiously, and blindly,
while the other, knowing what he is about, acts
freely, clearly, and effectively.[3]
The same thing is true on the side of materials
[pg 24]
of instruction—the school studies. No
amount of exaltation of teleological personality
(however true, and however necessary
the emphasis) can disguise from us the fact
that instruction is an affair of bringing a child
into intimate relations with concrete objects,
positive facts, definite ideas, and specific symbols.
The symbols are objective things in
arithmetic, reading, and writing. The ideas
are truths of history and of science. The
facts are derived from such specific disciplines
as geography and language, botany and
astronomy. To suppose that by some influence
of pure personality upon pure personality,
conjoined with a knowledge of rules
formulated by an educational theorist, an
effective interplay of this body of physical
and ideal objects with the life of the child can
be effective, is, I submit, nothing but an appeal
to magic, plus dependence upon servile routine.
Symbols in reading and writing and number are,
both in themselves and in the way in which they
stand for ideas, elements in a mechanism which
has to be rendered operative within the child.
To bring about this influence in the most helpful
and economical way, in the most fruitful
and liberating way, is absolutely impossible
save as the teacher has some power to transmute
symbols and contents into their working
[pg 25]
psychical equivalents; and save as he also has
the power to see what it is in the child, as a
psychical mechanism, that affords maximum
leverage.
Probably I shall now hear that at present
the danger is not of dealing with acts and persons
in a gross, arbitrary way, but (so far as
what is called new education is concerned) in
treating the children too much as mechanism,
and consequently seeking for all kinds of
stimuli to stir and attract—that, in a word,
the tendency to reduce instruction to a merely
agreeable thing, weakening the child's personality
and indulging his mere love of excitement
and pleasure, is precisely the result of
taking the psycho-mechanical point of view.
I welcome the objection, for it serves to clear
up the precise point. It is through a partial
and defective psychology that the teacher, in
his reaction from dead routine and arbitrary
moral and intellectual discipline, has substituted
an appeal to the satisfaction of momentary
impulse. It is not because the teacher has
a knowledge of the psycho-physical mechanism,
but because he has a partial knowledge of
it. He has come to consciousness of certain
sensations and certain impulses, and of the
ways in which these may be stimulated and
directed, but he is in ignorance of the larger
[pg 26]
mechanism (just as a mechanism), and of the
causal relations which subsist between the
unknown part and the elements upon which
he is playing. What is needed to correct his
errors is not to inform him that he gets only
misleading from taking the psychical point of
view, but to reveal to him the scope and intricate
interactions of the mechanism as a whole.
Then he will realize that, while he is gaining
apparent efficacy in some superficial part of
the mechanism, he is disarranging, dislocating,
and disintegrating much more fundamental
factors in it. In a word, he is operating, not
as a psychologist, but as a poor psychologist,
and the only cure for a partial psychology is
a fuller one. He is gaining the momentary
attention of the child through an appeal to
pleasant color, or exciting tone, or agreeable
association, but at the expense of isolating
one cog and ratchet in the machinery, and
making it operate independently of the rest.
In theory, it is as possible to demonstrate this
to a teacher, showing how the faulty method
reacts unhappily into the personality, as it is
to locate the points of wrong construction and
of ineffective transfer of energy in a physical
apparatus.
This suggests the admission made by writers,
in many respects as far apart as Dr. Harris
[pg 27]
and Dr. Münsterberg, that scientific psychology
is of use on the pathological side, where
questions of "physical and mental health" are
concerned. But is there anything with which
the teacher has concern that is not included
in the ideal of physical and mental health?
Does health define to us anything less than
the teacher's whole end and aim? Where
does pathology leave off in the scale and
series of vicious aims and defective means?
I see no line between the more obvious
methods and materials which result in nervous
irritation and fatigue, in weakening the power
of vision, in establishing spinal curvatures,
and others which, in more remote and subtle,
but equally real, ways leave the child with,
say, a muscular system which is only partially
at the service of his ideas, with blocked and
inert brain paths between eye and ear, and
with a partial and disconnected development
of the cerebral paths of visual imagery. What
error in instruction is there which could not,
with proper psychological theory, be stated in
just such terms as these? A wrong method
of teaching reading, wrong, I mean, in the full
educational and ethical sense, is also a case
of pathological use of the psycho-physical
mechanism. A method is ethically defective
that, while giving the child a glibness in the
[pg 28]
mechanical facility of reading, leaves him at
the mercy of suggestion and chance environment
to decide whether he reads the "yellow
journal," the trashy novel, or the literature
which inspires and makes more valid his whole
life. Is it any less certain that this failure on
the ethical side is repeated in some lack of
adequate growth and connection in the psychical
and physiological factors involved? If
a knowledge of psychology is important to
the teacher in the grosser and more overt cases
of mental pathology, is it not even more important
in these hidden and indirect matters—just
because they are less evident, and more circuitous
in their operation and manifestation?
The argument may be summarized by saying
that there is controversy neither as to the
ethical character of education, nor as to the
abstraction which psychology performs in
reducing personality to an object. The teacher
is, indeed, a person occupied with other persons.
He lives in a social sphere—he is a
member and an organ of a social life. His
aims are social aims; the development of
individuals taking ever more responsible positions
in a circle of social activities continually
increasing in radius and in complexity. Whatever
he as a teacher effectively does, he does
as a person; and he does with and toward
[pg 29]
persons. His methods, like his aims, when
actively in operation, are practical, are social,
are ethical, are anything you please—save
merely psychical. In comparison with this, the
material and the data, the standpoint and the
methods of psychology, are abstract. They
transform specific acts and relations of individuals
into a flow of processes in consciousness;
and these processes can be adequately
identified and related only through reference
to a biological organism. I do not think there
is danger of going too far in asserting the social
and teleological nature of the work of the
teacher; or in asserting the abstract and partial
character of the mechanism into which the
psychologist, as a psychologist, transmutes the
play of vital values.
Does it follow from this that any attempt on
the part of the teacher to perform this abstraction,
to see the pupil as a mechanism, to define
his own relations and that of the study taught
in terms of causal influences acting upon this
mechanism, is useless and harmful? On the
face of it, I cannot understand the logic which
says that because mechanism is mechanism, and
because acts, aims, values are vital, therefore a
statement in terms of one is alien to the comprehension
and proper management of the
other. Ends are not compromised when referred
[pg 30]
to the means necessary to realize them.
Values do not cease to be values when they are
minutely and accurately measured. Acts are
not destroyed when their operative machinery
is made manifest. The statement of the disparity
of mechanism and actual life, be it never
so true, solves no problem. It is no distinction
that may be used off-hand to decide the question
of the relation of psychology to any form
of practice. It is a valuable and necessary
distinction; but it is only preliminary. The
purport of our discussion has, indeed, led us
strongly to suspect any ideal which exists
purely at large, out of relation to machinery
of execution, and equally a machinery that
operates in no particular direction.
The proposition that a description and
explanation of stones, iron, and mortar, as an
absolutely necessary causal nexus of mechanical
conditions, makes the results of physical
science unavailable for purposes of practical
life, would hardly receive attention today.
Every sky-scraper, every railway bridge, is a
refutation, compared with which oceans of talk
are futile. One would not find it easy to stir
up a problem, even if he went on to include, in
this same mechanical system, the steam derricks
that hoist the stones and iron, and the muscles
and nerves of architect, mason, and steel worker.
[pg 31]
The simple fact is still too obvious: the more
thoroughgoing and complete the mechanical
and causal statement, the more controlled, the
more economical, are the discovery and realization
of human aims. It is not in spite of, nor
in neglect of, but because of, the mechanical
statement that human activity has been freed,
and made effective in thousands of new practical
directions, upon a scale and with a certainty
hitherto undreamed of. Our discussion tends
to suggest that we entertain a similar question
regarding psychology only because we have as
yet made so little headway—just because
there is so little scientific control of our practice
in these directions; that at bottom our difficulty
is local and circumstantial, not intrinsic and
doctrinal. If our teachers were trained as
architects are trained; if our schools were
actually managed on a psychological basis as
great factories are run on the basis of chemical
and physical science; if our psychology were
sufficiently organized and coherent to give as
adequate a mechanical statement of human
nature as physics does of its material, we
should never dream of discussing this question.
I cannot pass on from this phase of the discussion
without at least incidental remark of
the obverse side of the situation. The difficulties
of psychological observation and interpretation
[pg 32]
are great enough in any case. We
cannot afford to neglect any possible auxiliary.
The great advantage of the psycho-physical
laboratory is paid for by certain obvious
defects. The completer control of conditions,
with resulting greater accuracy of determination,
demands an isolation, a ruling out of the
usual media of thought and action, which
leads to a certain remoteness, and easily to a
certain artificiality. When the result of laboratory
experiment informs us, for example,
that repetition is the chief factor influencing
recall, we must bear in mind that the result is
obtained with nonsense material, i. e., by excluding
the conditions of ordinary memory.
The result is pertinent if we state it thus:
The more we exclude the usual environmental
adaptations of memory, the greater importance
attaches to sheer repetition. It is dubious
(and probably perverse) if we say: Repetition
is the prime influence in memory.
Now, this illustrates a general principle.
Unless our laboratory results are to give us
artificialities, mere scientific curiosities, they
must be subjected to interpretation by gradual
reapproximation to conditions of life. The
results may be very accurate, very definitive
in form; but the task of re-viewing them so
as to see their actual import is clearly one of
[pg 33]
great delicacy and liability to error. The
laboratory, in a word, affords no final refuge
that enables us to avoid the ordinary scientific
difficulties of forming hypotheses, interpreting
results, etc. In some sense (from the very
accuracy and limitations of its results) it adds
to our responsibilities in this direction. Now
the school, for psychological purposes, stands
in many respects midway between the extreme
simplifications of the laboratory and the confused
complexities of ordinary life. Its conditions
are those of life at large; they are
social and practical. But it approaches the
laboratory in so far as the ends aimed at are
reduced in number, are definite, and thus simplify
the conditions; and their psychological
phase is uppermost—the formation of habits
of attention, observation, memory, etc.—while
in ordinary life these are secondary and swallowed
up.
If the biological and evolutionary attitude
is right in looking at mind as fundamentally
an instrument of adaptation, there are certainly
advantages in any mode of approach
which brings us near to its various adaptations
while they are still forming, and under conditions
selected with special reference to promoting
these adaptations (or faculties). And
this is precisely the situation we should have
[pg 34]
in a properly organized system of education.
While the psychological theory would guide
and illuminate the practice, acting upon the
theory would immediately test it, and thus
criticise it, bringing about its revision and
growth. In the large and open sense of the
words, psychology becomes a working hypothesis,
instruction is the experimental test and
demonstration of the hypothesis; the result is
both greater practical control and continued
growth in theory.
