Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals. William James
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Our mental life is a succession of conscious 'fields,'—They have a focus and a margin—This description contrasted with the theory of 'ideas,'—Wundt's conclusions, note.
III. THE CHILD AS A BEHAVING ORGANISM
Mind as pure reason and mind as practical guide—The latter view the more fashionable one to-day—It will be adopted in this work—Why so?—The teacher's function is to train pupils to behavior.
Education defined—Conduct is always its outcome—Different national ideals: Germany and England.
No impression without expression—Verbal reproduction—Manual training—Pupils should know their 'marks'.
VI. NATIVE REACTIONS AND ACQUIRED REACTIONS
The acquired reactions must be preceded by native ones—Illustration: teaching child to ask instead of snatching—Man has more instincts than other mammals.
VII. WHAT THE NATIVE REACTIONS ARE
Fear and love—Curiosity—Imitation—Emulation—Forbidden by Rousseau—His error—Ambition, pugnacity, and pride. Soft pedagogics and the fighting impulse—Ownership—Its educational uses—Constructiveness—Manual teaching—Transitoriness in instincts—Their order of succession.
Good and bad habits—Habit due to plasticity of organic tissues—The aim of education is to make useful habits automatic—Maxims relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative—2. No exception—3. Seize first opportunity to act—4. Don't preach—Darwin and poetry: without exercise our capacities decay—The habit of mental and muscular relaxation—Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort trained—Sudden conversions compatible with laws of habit—Momentous influence of habits on character.
A case of habit—The two laws, contiguity and similarity—The teacher has to build up useful systems of association—Habitual associations determine character—Indeterminateness of our trains of association—We can trace them backward, but not foretell them—Interest deflects—Prepotent parts of the field—In teaching, multiply cues.
The child's native interests—How uninteresting things acquire an interest—Rules for the teacher—'Preparation' of the mind for the lesson: the pupil must have something to attend with—All later interests are borrowed from original ones.
Interest and attention are two aspects of one fact—Voluntary attention comes in beats—Genius and attention—The subject must change to win attention—Mechanical aids—The physiological process—The new in the old is what excites interest—Interest and effort are compatible—Mind-wandering—Not fatal to mental efficiency.
Due to association—No recall without a cue—Memory is due to brain-plasticity—Native retentiveness—Number of associations may practically be its equivalent—Retentiveness is a fixed property of the individual—Memory versus memories—Scientific system as help to memory—Technical memories—Cramming—Elementary memory unimprovable—Utility of verbal memorizing—Measurements of immediate memory—They throw little light—Passion is the important factor in human efficiency—Eye-memory, ear-memory, etc.—The rate of forgetting, Ebbinghaus's results—Influence of the unreproducible—To remember, one must think and connect.
XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS
Education gives a stock of conceptions—The order of their acquisition—Value of verbal material—Abstractions of different orders: when are they assimilable—False conceptions of children.
Often a mystifying idea—The process defined—The law of economy—Old-fogyism—How many types of apperception?—New heads of classification must continually be invented—Alteration of the apperceiving mass—Class names are what we work by—Few new fundamental conceptions acquired after twenty-five.
The word defined—All consciousness tends to action—Ideo-motor action—Inhibition—The process of deliberation—Why so few of our ideas result in acts—The associationist account of the will—A balance of impulses and inhibitions—The over-impulsive and the over-obstructed type—The perfect type—The balky will—What character building consists in—Right action depends on right apperception of the case—Effort of will is effort of attention: the drunkard's dilemma—Vital importance of voluntary attention—Its amount may be indeterminate—Affirmation of free-will—Two types of inhibition—Spinoza on inhibition by a higher good—Conclusion.
TALKS TO STUDENTS I. THE GOSPEL OF RELAXATION II. ON A CERTAIN BLINDNESS IN HUMAN BEINGS III. WHAT MAKES A LIFE SIGNIFICANT
TALKS TO TEACHERS
I. PSYCHOLOGY AND THE TEACHING ART
In the general activity and uprising of ideal interests which every one with an eye for fact can discern all about us in American life, there is perhaps no more promising feature than the fermentation which for a dozen years or more has been going on among the teachers. In whatever sphere of education their functions may lie, there is to be seen among them a really inspiring amount of searching of the heart about the highest concerns of their profession. The renovation of nations begins always at the top, among the reflective members of the State, and spreads slowly outward and downward. The teachers of this country, one may say, have its future in their hands. The earnestness which they at present show in striving to enlighten and strengthen themselves is an index of the nation's probabilities of advance in all ideal directions. The outward organization of education which we have in our United States is perhaps, on the whole, the best organization that exists in any country. The State school systems give a diversity and flexibility, an opportunity for experiment and keenness of competition,