|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 17
One can draw no specific rules for all this. It depends on close
observation in the particular case, and parents here have a great
advantage over teachers. In fact, the law of transitoriness has little
chance of individualized application in the schools.
Such is the little interested and impulsive psychophysical organism
whose springs of action the teacher must divine, and to whose ways he
must become accustomed. He must start with the native tendencies, and
enlarge the pupil's entire passive and active experience. He must ply
him with new objects and stimuli, and make him taste the fruits of his
behavior, so that now that whole context of remembered experience is
what shall determine his conduct when he gets the stimulus, and not the
bare immediate impression. As the pupil's life thus enlarges, it gets
fuller and fuller of all sorts of memories and associations and
substitutions; but the eye accustomed to psychological analysis will
discern, underneath it all, the outlines of our simple psychophysical
scheme.
Respect then, I beg you, always the original reactions, even when you
are seeking to overcome their connection with certain objects, and to
supplant them with others that you wish to make the rule. Bad behavior,
from the point of view of the teacher's art, is as good a starting-point
as good behavior. In fact, paradoxical as it may sound to say so, it is
often a better starting-point than good behavior would be.
The acquired reactions must be made habitual whenever they are
appropriate. Therefore Habit is the next subject to which your attention
is invited.
VIII. THE LAWS OF HABIT
It is very important that teachers should realize the importance of
habit, and psychology helps us greatly at this point. We speak, it is
true, of good habits and of bad habits; but, when people use the word
'habit,' in the majority of instances it is a bad habit which they
have in mind. They talk of the smoking-habit and the swearing-habit
and the drinking-habit, but not of the abstention-habit or the
moderation-habit or the courage-habit. But the fact is that our
virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it
has definite form, is but a mass of habits,--practical, emotional, and
intellectual,--systematically organized for our weal or woe, and
bearing us irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be.
Since pupils can understand this at a comparatively early age, and since
to understand it contributes in no small measure to their feeling of
responsibility, it would be well if the teacher were able himself to
talk to them of the philosophy of habit in some such abstract terms as I
am now about to talk of it to you.
I believe that we are subject to the law of habit in consequence of the
fact that we have bodies. The plasticity of the living matter of our
nervous system, in short, is the reason why we do a thing with
difficulty the first time, but soon do it more and more easily, and
finally, with sufficient practice, do it semi-mechanically, or with
hardly any consciousness at all. Our nervous systems have (in Dr.
Carpenter's words) _grown_ to the way in which they have been exercised,
just as a sheet of paper or a coat, once creased or folded, tends to
fall forever afterward into the same identical folds.
Habit is thus a second nature, or rather, as the Duke of Wellington
said, it is 'ten times nature,'--at any rate as regards its importance
in adult life; for the acquired habits of our training have by that time
inhibited or strangled most of the natural impulsive tendencies which
were originally there. Ninety-nine hundredths or, possibly, nine hundred
and ninety-nine thousandths of our activity is purely automatic and
habitual, from our rising in the morning to our lying down each night.
Our dressing and undressing, our eating and drinking, our greetings and
partings, our hat-raisings and giving way for ladies to precede, nay,
even most of the forms of our common speech, are things of a type so
fixed by repetition as almost to be classed as reflex actions. To each
sort of impression we have an automatic, ready-made response. My very
words to you now are an example of what I mean; for having already
lectured upon habit and printed a chapter about it in a book, and read
the latter when in print, I find my tongue inevitably falling into its
old phrases and repeating almost literally what I said before.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|