326 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XI. No. 270. 



believing that psychologj^ — the ability to 

 transform a living personality into an ob- 

 jective mechanism for the time being — is 

 not merely an incidental help, but an or- 

 ganic necessity. Upon the whole, the best 

 efforts of teachers at present are partly 

 paralyzed, partly distorted, and partly ren- 

 dered futile precisely from the fact that 

 they are in such immediate contact with 

 sheer, unanalyzed personality. The rela- 

 tion is such a purely ethical and personal 

 one that the teacher cannot get enough 

 outside the situation to handle it intelli- 

 gently and effectively. He is in precisely 

 the condition in which the physician was 

 when he had no recourse save to deal with 

 health as entity or force on one side, and 

 disease as opposing agency or invading in- 

 fluence upon the other. The teacher reacts 

 en bloc, in a gross wholesale way, to some- 

 thing which he takes in an equally unde- 

 fined and total waj' in the child. It is the 

 inability to regard, upon occasion, both 

 himself and the child as just objects work- 

 ing upon each other in specific ways that 

 compels him to resort to purely arbitrary 

 measures, to fall back upon mere routine 

 traditions of school teaching, or to fly to 

 the latest fad of pedagogical theorists — the 

 latest panacea peddled out in school jour- 

 nals or teachers' institutes — just as the old 

 physician relied upon his magic formula. 



I repeat, it is the fundamental weakness 

 of our teaching force to-day (putting aside 

 teachers who are actually incompetent by 

 reason either of wrong motives or inad- 

 equate preparation), that they react in 

 gross to the child's exhibitions in gross 

 without analyzing them into their detailed 

 and constituent elements. If the child is 

 angry, he is dealt with simply as an angry 

 being ; anger is an entity, a force, not a 

 symptom. If a child is inattentive, this 

 again is treated as a mere case of refusal to 

 use the faculty or function of attention, of 

 sheer unwillingness to act. Teachers tell 



you that a child is careless or inattentive in 

 the same final way in which they would 

 tell you that a piece of paper is white. It 

 is just a fact, and that is all there is of it. 

 Now it is onljr through some recognition of 

 attention as a mechanism, some awareness 

 of the interplay of sensations, images and 

 motor impulses which constitute it as an 

 objective fact that the teacher can deal 

 effectively with attention as a function. 

 And, of course, the same is true of memory, 

 quick and useful observation, good judg- 

 ment and all the other practical powers the 

 teacher is attempting to cultivate. 



Consideration of the abstract concepts of 

 mechanism and personality is important. 

 Too much preoccupation with them in a 

 general fashion, however, without transla- 

 tion into relevant imagery of actual condi- 

 tions is likely to give rise to unreal difficul- 

 ties. The ethical personality does not go 

 to school naked, it takes with it the body as 

 the instrument through which all influences 

 reach it, and through control of which its 

 ideas are both elaborated and expressed. 

 The teacher does not deal with personality 

 at large, but as expressed in intellectual 

 and practical impulses and habits. The 

 ethical personality is not formed — it is 

 forming. The teacher must provide stimuli 

 leading to the equipment of personality 

 with active habits and interests. When 

 we consider the problem of forming habits 

 and interests we find ourselves at once con- 

 fronted with matters of this sort: What 

 stimuli shall be presented to the sense or- 

 gans and how ? What stable complexes of 

 associations shall be organized? What 

 motor impulses shall be evoked, and to 

 what extent? How shall they be induced 

 in such a way as to bring favorable stimuli 

 under greater control, and to lessen the dan- 

 ger of excitation from undesirable stimuli ? 

 In a word, the teacher is dealing with the 

 psychical factors that are concerned with 

 furtherance of certain habits, and the in- 



