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Page 25
_Next, step by step, connect with these first objects and experiences
the later objects and ideas which you wish to instill. Associate the new
with the old in some natural and telling way, so that the interest,
being shed along from point to point, finally suffuses the entire system
of objects of thought._
This is the abstract statement; and, abstractly, nothing can be easier
to understand. It is in the fulfilment of the rule that the difficulty
lies; for the difference between an interesting and a tedious teacher
consists in little more than the inventiveness by which the one is able
to mediate these associations and connections, and in the dulness in
discovering such transitions which the other shows. One teacher's mind
will fairly coruscate with points of connection between the new lesson
and the circumstances of the children's other experience. Anecdotes and
reminiscences will abound in her talk; and the shuttle of interest will
shoot backward and forward, weaving the new and the old together in a
lively and entertaining way. Another teacher has no such inventive
fertility, and his lesson will always be a dead and heavy thing. This is
the psychological meaning of the Herbartian principle of 'preparation'
for each lesson, and of correlating the new with the old. It is the
psychological meaning of that whole method of concentration in studies
of which you have been recently hearing so much. When the geography and
English and history and arithmetic simultaneously make cross-references
to one another, you get an interesting set of processes all along the
line.
* * * * *
If, then, you wish to insure the interest of your pupils, there is only
one way to do it; and that is to make certain that they have something
in their minds _to attend with_, when you begin to talk. That something
can consist in nothing but a previous lot of ideas already interesting
in themselves, and of such a nature that the incoming novel objects
which you present can dovetail into them and form with them some kind of
a logically associated or systematic whole. Fortunately, almost any kind
of a connection is sufficient to carry the interest along. What a help
is our Philippine war at present in teaching geography! But before the
war you could ask the children if they ate pepper with their eggs, and
where they supposed the pepper came from. Or ask them if glass is a
stone, and, if not, why not; and then let them know how stones are
formed and glass manufactured. External links will serve as well as
those that are deeper and more logical. But interest, once shed upon a
subject, is liable to remain always with that subject. Our acquisitions
become in a measure portions of our personal self; and little by little,
as cross-associations multiply and habits of familiarity and practice
grow, the entire system of our objects of thought consolidates, most of
it becoming interesting for some purposes and in some degree.
An adult man's interests are almost every one of them intensely
artificial: they have slowly been built up. The objects of professional
interest are most of them, in their original nature, repulsive; but by
their connection with such natively exciting objects as one's personal
fortune, one's social responsibilities, and especially by the force of
inveterate habit, they grow to be the only things for which in middle
life a man profoundly cares.
But in all these the spread and consolidation have followed nothing but
the principles first laid down. If we could recall for a moment our
whole individual history, we should see that our professional ideals and
the zeal they inspire are due to nothing but the slow accretion of one
mental object to another, traceable backward from point to point till we
reach the moment when, in the nursery or in the schoolroom, some little
story told, some little object shown, some little operation witnessed,
brought the first new object and new interest within our ken by
associating it with some one of those primitively there. The interest
now suffusing the whole system took its rise in that little event, so
insignificant to us now as to be entirely forgotten. As the bees in
swarming cling to one another in layers till the few are reached whose
feet grapple the bough from which the swarm depends; so with the objects
of our thinking,--they hang to each other by associated links, but the
_original_ source of interest in all of them is the native interest
which the earliest one once possessed.
XI. ATTENTION
Whoever treats of interest inevitably treats of attention, for to say
that an object is interesting is only another way of saying that it
excites attention. But in addition to the attention which any object
already interesting or just becoming interesting claims--passive
attention or spontaneous attention, we may call it--there is a more
deliberate attention,--voluntary attention or attention with effort, as
it is called,--which we can give to objects less interesting or
uninteresting in themselves. The distinction between active and passive
attention is made in all books on psychology, and connects itself with
the deeper aspects of the topic. From our present purely practical point
of view, however, it is not necessary to be intricate; and passive
attention to natively interesting material requires no further
elucidation on this occasion. All that we need explicitly to note is
that, the more the passive attention is relied on, by keeping the
material interesting; and the less the kind of attention requiring
effort is appealed to; the more smoothly and pleasantly the classroom
work goes on. I must say a few more words, however, about this latter
process of voluntary and deliberate attention.
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