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Page 24
The native interests of children lie altogether in the sphere of
sensation. Novel things to look at or novel sounds to hear, especially
when they involve the spectacle of action of a violent sort, will always
divert the attention from abstract conceptions of objects verbally taken
in. The grimace that Johnny is making, the spitballs that Tommy is ready
to throw, the dog-fight in the street, or the distant firebells
ringing,--these are the rivals with which the teacher's powers of being
interesting have incessantly to cope. The child will always attend more
to what a teacher does than to what the same teacher says. During the
performance of experiments or while the teacher is drawing on the
blackboard, the children are tranquil and absorbed. I have seen a
roomful of college students suddenly become perfectly still, to look at
their professor of physics tie a piece of string around a stick which he
was going to use in an experiment, but immediately grow restless when he
began to explain the experiment. A lady told me that one day, during a
lesson, she was delighted at having captured so completely the attention
of one of her young charges. He did not remove his eyes from her face;
but he said to her after the lesson was over, "I looked at you all the
time, and your upper jaw did not move once!" That was the only fact that
he had taken in.
Living things, then, moving things, or things that savor of danger or of
blood, that have a dramatic quality,--these are the objects natively
interesting to childhood, to the exclusion of almost everything else;
and the teacher of young children, until more artificial interests have
grown up, will keep in touch with her pupils by constant appeal to such
matters as these. Instruction must be carried on objectively,
experimentally, anecdotally. The blackboard-drawing and story-telling
must constantly come in. But of course these methods cover only the
first steps, and carry one but a little way.
Can we now formulate any general principle by which the later and more
artificial interests connect themselves with these early ones that the
child brings with him to the school?
Fortunately, we can: there is a very simple law that relates the
acquired and the native interests with each other.
_Any object not interesting in itself may become interesting through
becoming associated with an object in which an interest already exists.
The two associated objects grow, as it were, together: the interesting
portion sheds its quality over the whole; and thus things not
interesting in their own right borrow an interest which becomes as real
and as strong as that of any natively interesting thing._ The odd
circumstance is that the borrowing does not impoverish the source, the
objects taken together being more interesting, perhaps, than the
originally interesting portion was by itself.
This is one of the most striking proofs of the range of application of
the principle of association of ideas in psychology. An idea will infect
another with its own emotional interest when they have become both
associated together into any sort of a mental total. As there is no
limit to the various associations into which an interesting idea may
enter, one sees in how many ways an interest may be derived.
You will understand this abstract statement easily if I take the most
frequent of concrete examples,--the interest which things borrow from
their connection with our own personal welfare. The most natively
interesting object to a man is his own personal self and its fortunes.
We accordingly see that the moment a thing becomes connected with the
fortunes of the self, it forthwith becomes an interesting thing. Lend
the child his books, pencils, and other apparatus: then give them to
him, make them his own, and notice the new light with which they
instantly shine in his eyes. He takes a new kind of care of them
altogether. In mature life, all the drudgery of a man's business or
profession, intolerable in itself, is shot through with engrossing
significance because he knows it to be associated with his personal
fortunes. What more deadly uninteresting object can there be than a
railroad time-table? Yet where will you find a more interesting object
if you are going on a journey, and by its means can find your train? At
such times the time-table will absorb a man's entire attention, its
interest being borrowed solely from its relation to his personal life.
_From all these facts there emerges a very simple abstract programme for
the teacher to follow in keeping the attention of the child: Begin with
the line of his native interests, and offer him objects that have some
immediate connection with these_. The kindergarten methods, the
object-teaching routine, the blackboard and manual-training work,--all
recognize this feature. Schools in which these methods preponderate are
schools where discipline is easy, and where the voice of the master
claiming order and attention in threatening tones need never be heard.
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