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Page 5
Fortunately for you teachers, the elements of the mental machine can be
clearly apprehended, and their workings easily grasped. And, as the most
general elements and workings are just those parts of psychology which
the teacher finds most directly useful, it follows that the amount of
this science which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
Those who find themselves loving the subject may go as far as they
please, and become possibly none the worse teachers for the fact, even
though in some of them one might apprehend a little loss of balance from
the tendency observable in all of us to overemphasize certain special
parts of a subject when we are studying it intensely and abstractly. But
for the great majority of you a general view is enough, provided it be a
true one; and such a general view, one may say, might almost be written
on the palm of one's hand.
Least of all need you, merely _as teachers_, deem it part of your duty
to become contributors to psychological science or to make psychological
observations in a methodical or responsible manner. I fear that some of
the enthusiasts for child-study have thrown a certain burden on you in
this way. By all means let child-study go on,--it is refreshing all our
sense of the child's life. There are teachers who take a spontaneous
delight in filling syllabuses, inscribing observations, compiling
statistics, and computing the per cent. Child-study will certainly
enrich their lives. And, if its results, as treated statistically, would
seem on the whole to have but trifling value, yet the anecdotes and
observations of which it in part consist do certainly acquaint us more
intimately with our pupils. Our eyes and ears grow quickened to discern
in the child before us processes similar to those we have read of as
noted in the children,--processes of which we might otherwise have
remained inobservant. But, for Heaven's sake, let the rank and file of
teachers be passive readers if they so prefer, and feel free not to
contribute to the accumulation. Let not the prosecution of it be
preached as an imperative duty or imposed by regulation on those to whom
it proves an exterminating bore, or who in any way whatever miss in
themselves the appropriate vocation for it. I cannot too strongly agree
with my colleague, Professor M�nsterberg, when he says that the
teacher's attitude toward the child, being concrete and ethical, is
positively opposed to the psychological observer's, which is abstract
and analytic. Although some of us may conjoin the attitudes
successfully, in most of us they must conflict.
The worst thing that can happen to a good teacher is to get a bad
conscience about her profession because she feels herself hopeless as a
psychologist. Our teachers are overworked already. Every one who adds a
jot or tittle of unnecessary weight to their burden is a foe of
education. A bad conscience increases the weight of every other burden;
yet I know that child-study, and other pieces of psychology as well,
have been productive of bad conscience in many a really innocent
pedagogic breast. I should indeed be glad if this passing word from me
might tend to dispel such a bad conscience, if any of you have it; for
it is certainly one of those fruits of more or less systematic
mystification of which I have already complained. The best teacher may
be the poorest contributor of child-study material, and the best
contributor may be the poorest teacher. No fact is more palpable than
this.
So much for what seems the most reasonable general attitude of the
teacher toward the subject which is to occupy our attention.
II. THE STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
I said a few minutes ago that the most general elements and workings of
the mind are all that the teacher absolutely needs to be acquainted with
for his purposes.
Now the _immediate_ fact which psychology, the science of mind, has to
study is also the most general fact. It is the fact that in each of us,
when awake (and often when asleep), _some kind of consciousness is
always going on_. There is a stream, a succession of states, or waves,
or fields (or of whatever you please to call them), of knowledge, of
feeling, of desire, of deliberation, etc., that constantly pass and
repass, and that constitute our inner life. The existence of this stream
is the primal fact, the nature and origin of it form the essential
problem, of our science. So far as we class the states or fields of
consciousness, write down their several natures, analyze their contents
into elements, or trace their habits of succession, we are on the
descriptive or analytic level. So far as we ask where they come from or
why they are just what they are, we are on the explanatory level.
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