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Page 37
But here, as elsewhere, it is a matter of more or less; and, in the last
resort, the teacher's own tact is the only thing that can bring out the
right effect. The great difficulty with abstractions is that of knowing
just what meaning the pupil attaches to the terms he uses. The words may
sound all right, but the meaning remains the child's own secret. So
varied forms of words must be insisted on, to bring the secret out. And
a strange secret does it often prove. A relative of mine was trying to
explain to a little girl what was meant by 'the passive voice': "Suppose
that you kill me: you who do the killing are in the active voice, and I,
who am killed, am in the passive voice." "But how can you speak if
you're killed?" said the child. "Oh, well, you may suppose that I am
not yet quite dead!" The next day the child was asked, in class, to
explain the passive voice, and said, "It's the kind of voice you speak
with when you ain't quite dead."
In such a case as this the illustration ought to have been more varied.
Every one's memory will probably furnish examples of the fantastic
meaning which their childhood attached to certain verbal statements (in
poetry often), and which their elders, not having any reason to suspect,
never corrected. I remember being greatly moved emotionally at the age
of eight by the ballad of Lord Ullin's Daughter. Yet I thought that the
staining of the heather by the blood was the evil chiefly dreaded, and
that, when the boatman said,
"I'll row you o'er the ferry.
It is not for your silver bright,
But for your winsome lady,"
he was to receive the lady for his pay. Similarly, I recently found that
one of my own children was reading (and accepting) a verse of Tennyson's
In Memoriam as
"Ring out the _food_ of rich and poor,
Ring in _redness_ to all mankind,"
and finding no inward difficulty.
The only safeguard against this sort of misconceiving is to insist on
varied statement, and to bring the child's conceptions, wherever it be
possible, to some sort of practical test.
Let us next pass to the subject of Apperception.
XIV. APPERCEPTION
'Apperception' is a word which cuts a great figure in the pedagogics of
the present day. Read, for example, this advertisement of a certain
text-book, which I take from an educational journal:--
#WHAT IS APPERCEPTION?#
For an explanation of Apperception see Blank's PSYCHOLOGY,
Vol. ---- of the ---- Education Series, just published.
The difference between Perception and Apperception is
explained for the teacher in the preface to Blank's
PSYCHOLOGY.
Many teachers are inquiring, "What is the meaning of
Apperception in educational psychology?" Just the book for
them is Blank's PSYCHOLOGY in which the idea was first
expounded.
The most important idea in educational psychology is
Apperception. The teacher may find this expounded in Blank's
PSYCHOLOGY. The idea of Apperception is making a revolution
in educational methods in Germany. It is explained in Blank's
PSYCHOLOGY, Vol. ---- of the ---- Education Series, just
published.
Blank's PSYCHOLOGY will be mailed prepaid to any address on
receipt of $1.00.
Such an advertisement is in sober earnest a disgrace to all concerned;
and such talk as it indulges in is the sort of thing I had in view when
I said at our first meeting that the teachers were suffering at the
present day from a certain industrious mystification on the part of
editors and publishers. Perhaps the word 'apperception' flourished in
their eyes and ears as it nowadays often is, embodies as much of this
mystification as any other single thing. The conscientious young teacher
is led to believe that it contains a recondite and portentous secret, by
losing the true inwardness of which her whole career may be shattered.
And yet, when she turns to the books and reads about it, it seems so
trivial and commonplace a matter,--meaning nothing more than the manner
in which we receive a thing into our minds,--that she fears she must
have missed the point through the shallowness of her intelligence, and
goes about thereafter afflicted with a sense either of uncertainty or of
stupidity, and in each case remaining mortified at being so inadequate
to her mission.
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