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Page 15
The wise teacher will use this instinct as he uses others, reaping its
advantages, and appealing to it in such a way as to reap a maximum of
benefit with a minimum of harm; for, after all, we must confess, with a
French critic of Rousseau's doctrine, that the deepest spring of action
in us is the sight of action in another. The spectacle of effort is what
awakens and sustains our own effort. No runner running all alone on a
race-track will find in his own will the power of stimulation which his
rivalry with other runners incites, when he feels them at his heels,
about to pass. When a trotting horse is 'speeded,' a running horse must
go beside him to keep him to the pace.
As imitation slides into emulation, so emulation slides into
_Ambition_; and ambition connects itself closely with _Pugnacity_ and
_Pride_. Consequently, these five instinctive tendencies form an
interconnected group of factors, hard to separate in the determination
of a great deal of our conduct. The _Ambitious Impulses_ would perhaps
be the best name for the whole group.
Pride and pugnacity have often been considered unworthy passions to
appeal to in the young. But in their more refined and noble forms they
play a great part in the schoolroom and in education generally, being in
some characters most potent spurs to effort. Pugnacity need not be
thought of merely in the form of physical combativeness. It can be taken
in the sense of a general unwillingness to be beaten by any kind of
difficulty. It is what makes us feel 'stumped' and challenged by arduous
achievements, and is essential to a spirited and enterprising character.
We have of late been hearing much of the philosophy of tenderness in
education; 'interest' must be assiduously awakened in everything,
difficulties must be smoothed away. _Soft_ pedagogics have taken the
place of the old steep and rocky path to learning. But from this
lukewarm air the bracing oxygen of effort is left out. It is nonsense
to suppose that every step in education _can_ be interesting. The
fighting impulse must often be appealed to. Make the pupil feel ashamed
of being scared at fractions, of being 'downed' by the law of falling
bodies; rouse his pugnacity and pride, and he will rush at the difficult
places with a sort of inner wrath at himself that is one of his best
moral faculties. A victory scored under such conditions becomes a
turning-point and crisis of his character. It represents the high-water
mark of his powers, and serves thereafter as an ideal pattern for his
self-imitation. The teacher who never rouses this sort of pugnacious
excitement in his pupils falls short of one of his best forms of
usefulness.
The next instinct which I shall mention is that of _Ownership_, also one
of the radical endowments of the race. It often is the antagonist of
imitation. Whether social progress is due more to the passion for
keeping old things and habits or to the passion of imitating and
acquiring new ones may in some cases be a difficult thing to decide. The
sense of ownership begins in the second year of life. Among the first
words which an infant learns to utter are the words 'my' and 'mine,'
and woe to the parents of twins who fail to provide their gifts in
duplicate. The depth and primitiveness of this instinct would seem to
cast a sort of psychological discredit in advance upon all radical forms
of communistic utopia. Private proprietorship cannot be practically
abolished until human nature is changed. It seems essential to mental
health that the individual should have something beyond the bare clothes
on his back to which he can assert exclusive possession, and which he
may defend adversely against the world. Even those religious orders who
make the most stringent vows of poverty have found it necessary to relax
the rule a little in favor of the human heart made unhappy by reduction
to too disinterested terms. The monk must have his books: the nun must
have her little garden, and the images and pictures in her room.
In education, the instinct of ownership is fundamental, and can be
appealed to in many ways. In the house, training in order and neatness
begins with the arrangement of the child's own personal possessions. In
the school, ownership is particularly important in connection with one
of its special forms of activity, the collecting impulse. An object
possibly not very interesting in itself, like a shell, a postage stamp,
or a single map or drawing, will acquire an interest if it fills a gap
in a collection or helps to complete a series. Much of the scholarly
work of the world, so far as it is mere bibliography, memory, and
erudition (and this lies at the basis of all our human scholarship),
would seem to owe its interest rather to the way in which it gratifies
the accumulating and collecting instinct than to any special appeal
which it makes to our cravings after rationality. A man wishes a
complete collection of information, wishes to know more about a subject
than anybody else, much as another may wish to own more dollars or more
early editions or more engravings before the letter than anybody else.
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