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Page 4
As regards this subject of psychology, now, I wish at the very threshold
to do what I can to dispel the mystification. So I say at once that in
my humble opinion there _is_ no 'new psychology' worthy of the name.
There is nothing but the old psychology which began in Locke's time,
plus a little physiology of the brain and senses and theory of
evolution, and a few refinements of introspective detail, for the most
part without adaptation to the teacher's use. It is only the fundamental
conceptions of psychology which are of real value to the teacher; and
they, apart from the aforesaid theory of evolution, are very far from
being new.--I trust that you will see better what I mean by this at the
end of all these talks.
I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think
that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from
which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of
instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and
teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of
themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by
using its originality.
The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of
ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The
most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check
ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise
ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. A science only
lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which
the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing
he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to his own
genius. One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while
another succeeds as well quite differently; yet neither will transgress
the lines.
The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and
sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart)
the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the
psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense
from the latter. The two were congruent, but neither was subordinate.
And so everywhere the teaching must _agree_ with the psychology, but
need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree;
for many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with
psychological laws.
To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall
be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have an additional
endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what
definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us. That
ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete
situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are
things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
The science of psychology, and whatever science of general pedagogics
may be based on it, are in fact much like the science of war. Nothing is
simpler or more definite than the principles of either. In war, all you
have to do is to work your enemy into a position from which the natural
obstacles prevent him from escaping if he tries to; then to fall on him
in numbers superior to his own, at a moment when you have led him to
think you far away; and so, with a minimum of exposure of your own
troops, to hack his force to pieces, and take the remainder prisoners.
Just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state
of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object
of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so
impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and
finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in
connection with the subject are. The principles being so plain, there
would be nothing but victories for the masters of the science, either on
the battlefield or in the schoolroom, if they did not both have to make
their application to an incalculable quantity in the shape of the mind
of their opponent. The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working
away from you as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on
the other side from the scientific general. Just what the respective
enemies want and think, and what they know and do not know, are as hard
things for the teacher as for the general to find out. Divination and
perception, not psychological pedagogics or theoretic strategy, are the
only helpers here.
But, if the use of psychological principles thus be negative rather than
positive, it does not follow that it may not be a great use, all the
same. It certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. We know
in advance, if we are psychologists, that certain methods will be wrong,
so our psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us, moreover, more
clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any
method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as
well as practice at its back. Most of all, it fructifies our
independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two
different angles,--to get a stereoscopic view, so to speak, of the
youthful organism who is our enemy, and, while handling him with all our
concrete tact and divination, to be able, at the same time, to represent
to ourselves the curious inner elements of his mental machine. Such a
complete knowledge as this of the pupil, at once intuitive and analytic,
is surely the knowledge at which every teacher ought to aim.
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