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Page 13
VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE
First of all, _Fear_. Fear of punishment has always been the great
weapon of the teacher, and will always, of course, retain some place in
the conditions of the schoolroom. The subject is so familiar that
nothing more need be said about it.
The same is true of _Love_, and the instinctive desire to please those
whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the
pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament
finds it impossible to secure.
Next, a word might be said about _Curiosity_. This is perhaps a rather
poor term by which to designate the _impulse toward better cognition_ in
its full extent; but you will readily understand what I mean. Novelties
in the way of sensible objects, especially if their sensational quality
is bright, vivid, startling, invariably arrest the attention of the
young and hold it until the desire to know more about the object is
assuaged. In its higher, more intellectual form, the impulse toward
completer knowledge takes the character of scientific or philosophic
curiosity. In both its sensational and its intellectual form the
instinct is more vivacious during childhood and youth than in after
life. Young children are possessed by curiosity about every new
impression that assails them. It would be quite impossible for a young
child to listen to a lecture for more than a few minutes, as you are now
listening to me. The outside sights and sounds would inevitably carry
his attention off. And, for most people in middle life, the sort of
intellectual effort required of the average schoolboy in mastering his
Greek or Latin lesson, his algebra or physics, would be out of the
question. The middle-aged citizen attends exclusively to the routine
details of his business; and new truths, especially when they require
involved trains of close reasoning, are no longer within the scope of
his capacity.
The sensational curiosity of childhood is appealed to more particularly
by certain determinate kinds of objects. Material things, things that
move, living things, human actions and accounts of human action, will
win the attention better than anything that is more abstract. Here again
comes in the advantage of the object-teaching and manual training
methods. The pupil's attention is spontaneously held by any problem that
involves the presentation of a new material object or of an activity on
any one's part. The teacher's earliest appeals, therefore, must be
through objects shown or acts performed or described. Theoretic
curiosity, curiosity about the rational relations between things, can
hardly be said to awake at all until adolescence is reached. The
sporadic metaphysical inquiries of children as to who made God, and why
they have five fingers, need hardly be counted here. But, when the
theoretic instinct is once alive in the pupil, an entirely new order of
pedagogic relations begins for him. Reasons, causes, abstract
conceptions, suddenly grow full of zest, a fact with which all teachers
are familiar. And, both in its sensible and in its rational
developments, disinterested curiosity may be successfully appealed to in
the child with much more certainty than in the adult, in whom this
intellectual instinct has grown so torpid as usually never to awake
unless it enters into association with some selfish personal interest.
Of this latter point I will say more anon.
_Imitation_. Man has always been recognized as the imitative animal
_par excellence_. And there is hardly a book on psychology, however old,
which has not devoted at least one paragraph to this fact. It is
strange, however, that the full scope and pregnancy of the imitative
impulse in man has had to wait till the last dozen years to become
adequately recognized. M. Tarde led the way in his admirably original
work, "Les Lois de l'Imitation"; and in our own country Professors Royce
and Baldwin have kept the ball rolling with all the energy that could be
desired. Each of us is in fact what he is almost exclusively by virtue
of his imitativeness. We become conscious of what we ourselves are by
imitating others--the consciousness of what the others are precedes--the
sense of self grows by the sense of pattern. The entire accumulated
wealth of mankind--languages, arts, institutions, and sciences--is
passed on from one generation to another by what Baldwin has called
social heredity, each generation simply imitating the last. Into the
particulars of this most fascinating chapter of psychology I have no
time to go. The moment one hears Tarde's proposition uttered, however,
one feels how supremely true it is. Invention, using the term most
broadly, and imitation, are the two legs, so to call them, on which the
human race historically has walked.
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