Part 8
In conclusion, it may be pointed out that such subject-matter and the method connect directly with the work of the six-year-old children (corresponding to the first grade of primary work). The play reproduction of the home life passes naturally on into a more extended and serious study of the larger social occupations upon which the home is dependent; while the continually increasing demands made upon the child’s own ability to plan and execute carry him over into more controlled use of attention upon more distinctively intellectual topics. It must not be forgotten that the readjustment needed to secure continuity between “kindergarten” and “first-grade” work cannot be brought about wholly from the side of the latter. The school change must be as gradual and insensible as that in the growth of the child. This is impossible unless the subprimary work surrenders whatever isolates it, and hospitably welcomes whatever materials and resources will keep pace with the full development of the child’s powers, and thus keep him always prepared, ready, for the next work he has to do.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OCCUPATIONS
VI
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF OCCUPATIONS
By occupation is not meant any kind of “busy work” or exercises that may be given to a child in order to keep him out of mischief or idleness when seated at his desk. By occupation I mean a mode of activity on the part of the child which reproduces, or runs parallel to, some form of work carried on in social life. In the University Elementary School these occupations are represented by the shopwork with wood and tools; by cooking, sewing, and by the textile work herewith reported upon.
The fundamental point in the psychology of an occupation is that it maintains a balance between the intellectual and the practical phases of experience. As an occupation it is active or motor; it finds expression through the physical organs—the eyes, hands, etc. But it also involves continual observation of materials, and continual planning and reflection, in order that the practical or executive side may be successfully carried on. Occupation as thus conceived must, therefore, be carefully distinguished from work which educates primarily for a trade. It differs because its end is in itself; in the growth that comes from the continual interplay of ideas and their embodiment in action, not in external utility.
It is possible to carry on this type of work in other than trade schools, so that the entire emphasis falls upon the manual or physical side. In such cases the work is reduced to a mere routine or custom, and its educational value is lost. This is the inevitable tendency wherever, in manual training for instance, the mastery of certain tools, or the production of certain objects, is made the primary end, and the child is not given, wherever possible, intellectual responsibility for selecting the materials and instruments that are most fit, and given an opportunity to think out his own model and plan of work, led to perceive his own errors, and find out how to correct them—that is, of course, within the range of his capacities. So far as the external result is held in view, rather than the mental and moral states and growth involved in the process of reaching the result, the work may be called manual, but cannot rightly be termed an occupation. Of course the tendency of all mere habit, routine, or custom is to result in what is unconscious and mechanical. That of occupation is to put the maximum of consciousness into whatever is done.
This enables us to interpret the stress laid (_a_) upon personal experimenting, planning, and reinventing in connection with the textile work, and (_b_) its parallelism with lines of historical development. The first requires the child to be mentally quick and alert at every point in order that he may do the outward work properly. The second enriches and deepens the work performed by saturating it with values suggested from the social life which it recapitulates.
Occupations, so considered, furnish the ideal occasions for both sense-training and discipline in thought. The weakness of ordinary lessons in observation, calculated to train the senses, is that they have no outlet beyond themselves, and hence no necessary motive. Now, in the natural life of the individual and the race there is always a reason for sense-observation. There is always some need, coming from an end to be reached, that makes one look about to discover and discriminate whatever will assist him. Normal sensations operate as clues, as aids, as stimuli, in directing activity in what has to be done; they are not ends in themselves. Separated from real needs and motives, sense-training becomes a mere gymnastic and easily degenerates into acquiring what are hardly more than mere knacks or tricks in observation, or else mere excitement of the sense organs.
The same principle applies in normal _thinking_. It also does not occur for its own sake, nor end in itself. It arises from the need of meeting some difficulty, in reflecting upon the best way of overcoming it, and thus leads to planning, to projecting mentally the result to be reached, and deciding upon the steps necessary and their serial order. This concrete logic of action long precedes the logic of pure speculation or abstract investigation, and through the mental habits that it forms is the best of preparations for the latter.
Another educational point upon which the psychology of occupations throws helpful light is the place of interest in school work. One of the objections regularly brought against giving in school work any large or positive place to the child’s interest is the impossibility on such a basis of proper selection. The child, it is said, has all kinds of interests, good, bad, and indifferent. It is necessary to decide between the interests that are really important and those that are trivial; between those that are helpful and those that are harmful; between those that are transitory or mark immediate excitement, and those which endure and are permanently influential. It would seem as if we had to go beyond interest to get any basis for using interest.
Now, there can be no doubt that occupation work possesses a strong interest for the child. A glance into any school where such work is carried on will give sufficient evidence of this fact. Outside of the school, a large portion of the children’s plays are simply more or less miniature and haphazard attempts at reproducing social occupations. There are certain reasons for believing that the type of interest which springs up along with these occupations is of a thoroughly healthy, permanent, and really educative sort; and that by giving a larger place to occupations we should secure an excellent, perhaps the very best, way of making an appeal to the child’s spontaneous interest, and yet have, at the same time, some guaranty that we are not dealing with what is merely pleasure-giving, exciting, or transient.
In the first place, every interest grows out of some instinct or some habit that in turn is finally based upon an original instinct. It does not follow that all instincts are of equal value, or that we do not inherit many instincts which need transformation, rather than satisfaction, in order to be useful in life. But the instincts which find their conscious outlet and expression in occupation are bound to be of an exceedingly fundamental and permanent type. The activities of life are of necessity directed to bringing the materials and forces of nature under the control of our purposes; of making them tributary to ends of life. Men have had to work in order to live. In and through their work they have mastered nature, they have protected and enriched the conditions of their own life, they have been awakened to the sense of their own powers—have been led to invent, to plan, and to rejoice in the acquisition of skill. In a rough way, all occupations may be classified as gathering about man’s fundamental relations to the world in which he lives through getting food to maintain life; securing clothing and shelter to protect and ornament it, and thus, finally, to provide a permanent home in which all the higher and more spiritual interests may center. It is hardly unreasonable to suppose that interests which have such a history behind them must be of the worthy sort.
However, these interests as they develop in the child not only recapitulate past important activities of the race, but reproduce those of the child’s present environment. He continually sees his elders engaged in such pursuits. He daily has to do with things which are the results of just such occupations. He comes in contact with facts that have no meaning, except in reference to them. Take these things out of the present social life and see how little would remain—and this not only on the material side, but as regards intellectual, aesthetic, and moral activities, for these are largely and necessarily bound up with occupations. The child’s instinctive interests in this direction are, therefore, constantly reinforced by what he sees, feels, and hears going on around him. Suggestions along this line are continually coming to him; motives are awakened; his energies are stirred to action. Again, it is not unreasonable to suppose that interests which are touched so constantly, and on so many sides, belong to the worthy and enduring type.
In the third place, one of the objections made against the principle of interest in education is that it tends to disintegration of mental economy by constantly stirring up the child in this way or that, destroying continuity and thoroughness. But an occupation (such as the textile one herewith reported on) is of necessity a continuous thing. It lasts, not only for days, but for months and years. It represents, not a stirring of isolated and superficial energies, but rather a steady, continuous organization of power along certain general lines. The same is true, of course, of any other form of occupation, such as shopwork with tools, or as cooking. The occupations articulate a vast variety of impulses, otherwise separate and spasmodic, into a consistent skeleton with a firm backbone. It may well be doubted whether, wholly apart from some such regular and progressive modes of action, extending as cores throughout the entire school, it would be permanently safe to give the principle of “interest” any large place in school work.
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION
VII
THE DEVELOPMENT OF ATTENTION
The subprimary or kindergarten department is undertaking the pedagogical problems growing out of an attempt to connect kindergarten work intimately with primary, and to readapt traditional materials and technique to meet present social conditions and our present physiological and psychological knowledge. A detailed statement of the work will be published later.
Little children have their observations and thoughts mainly directed toward people: what they do, how they behave, what they are occupied with, and what comes of it. Their interest is of a personal rather than of an objective or intellectual sort. Its intellectual counterpart is the story-form; not the task, consciously defined end, or problem—meaning by story-form something psychical, the holding together of a variety of persons, things, and incidents through a common idea that enlists feeling; not an outward relation or tale. Their minds seek wholes, varied through episode, enlivened with action and defined in salient features—there must be go, movement, the sense of use and operation—inspection of things separated from the idea by which they are carried. Analysis of isolated detail of form and structure neither appeals nor satisfies.
Material provided by existing social occupations is calculated to meet and feed this attitude. In previous years the children have been concerned with the occupations of the home, and the contact of homes with one another and with outside life. Now they may take up typical occupations of society at large—a step farther removed from the child’s egoistic, self-absorbed interest, and yet dealing with something personal and something which touches him.
From the standpoint of educational theory, the following features may be noted:
1. The study of natural objects, processes, and relations is placed in a human setting. During the year, a considerably detailed observation of seeds and their growth, of plants, woods, stones, animals, as to some phases of structure and habit, of geographical conditions of landscape, climate, arrangement of land and water, is undertaken. The pedagogical problem is to direct the child’s power of observation, to nurture his sympathetic interest in characteristic traits of the world in which he lives, to afford interpreting material for later more special studies, and yet to supply a carrying medium for the variety of facts and ideas through the dominant spontaneous emotions and thoughts of the child. Hence their association with human life. Absolutely no separation is made between the “social” side of the work, its concern with people’s activities and their mutual dependencies, and the “science,” regard for physical facts and forces—because the conscious distinction between man and nature is the result of later reflection and abstraction, and to force it upon the child here is not only to fail to engage his whole mental energy, but to confuse and distract him. The environment is always that in which life is situated and through which it is circumstanced; and to isolate it, to make it with little children an object of observation and remark by itself, is to treat human nature inconsiderately. At last, the original open and free attitude of the mind to nature is destroyed; nature has been reduced to a mass of meaningless details.
In its emphasis upon the “concrete” and “individual,” modern pedagogical theory often loses sight of the fact that the existence and presentation of an individual physical thing—a stone, an orange, a cat—is no guaranty of _concreteness_; that this is a psychological affair, whatever appeals to the mind as a whole, as a self-sufficient center of interest and attention. The reaction from this external and somewhat dead standpoint often assumes, however, that the needed clothing with human significance can come only by direct personification, and we have that continued symbolization of a plant, cloud, or rain which makes only pseudo-science possible; which, instead of generating love for nature itself, switches interest to certain sensational and emotional accompaniments, and leaves it, at last, dissipated and burnt out. And even the tendency to approach nature through the medium of literature, the pine tree through the fable of the discontented pine, etc., while recognizing the need of the human association, fails to note that there is a more straightforward road from mind to the object—direct through connection with life itself; and that the poem and story, the literary statement, have their place as reinforcements and idealizations, not as foundation stones. What is wanted, in other words, is not to fix up a connection of child mind and nature, but to give free and effective play to the connection already operating.
2. This suggests at once the practical questions that are usually discussed under the name of “correlation,” questions of such interaction of the various matters studied and powers under acquisition as will avoid waste and maintain unity of mental growth. From the standpoint adopted the problem is one of differentiation rather than of correlation as ordinarily understood. The unity of life, as it presents itself to the child, binds together and carries along the different occupations, the diversity of plants, animals, and geographic conditions; drawing, modeling, games, constructive work, numerical calculations are ways of carrying certain features of it to mental and emotional satisfaction and completeness. Not much attention is paid in this year to reading and writing; but it is obvious that if this were regarded as desirable, the same principle would apply. It is the community and continuity of the subject-matter that organizes, that correlates; correlation is not through devices of instruction which the teacher employs in tying together things in themselves disconnected.
3. Two recognized demands of primary education are often, at present, not unified or are even opposed. The need of the familiar, the already experienced, as a basis for moving upon the unknown and remote, is a commonplace. The claims of the child’s imagination as a factor is at least beginning to be recognized. The problem is to work these two forces together, instead of separately. The child is too often given drill upon familiar objects and ideas under the sanction of the first principle, while he is introduced with equal directness to the weird, strange, and impossible to satisfy the claims of the second. The result, it is hardly too much to say, is a twofold failure. There is no special connection between the unreal, the myth, the fairy tale, and the play of mental imagery. Imagination is not a matter of an impossible subject-matter, but a constructive way of dealing with any subject-matter under the influence of a pervading idea. The point is not to dwell with wearisome iteration upon the familiar and under the guise of object-lessons to keep the senses directed at material which they have already made acquaintance with, but to enliven and illumine the ordinary, commonplace, and homely by using it to build up and appreciate situations previously unrealized and alien. And this also is culture of imagination. Some writers appear to have the impression that the child’s imagination has outlet only in myth and fairy tale of ancient time and distant place or in weaving egregious fabrications regarding sun, moon, and stars; and have even pleaded for a mythical investiture of all “science”—as a way of satisfying the dominating imagination of the child. But fortunately these things are exceptions, are intensifications, are relaxations of the average child; not his pursuits. The John and Jane that most of us know let their imaginations play about the current and familiar contacts and events of life—about father and mother and friend, about steamboats and locomotives, and sheep and cows, about the romance of farm and forest, of seashore and mountain. What is needed, in a word, is to afford occasion by which the child is moved to educe and exchange with others his store of experiences, his range of information, to make new observations correcting and extending them in order to keep his images moving, in order to find mental rest and satisfaction in definite and vivid realization of what is new and enlarging.
With the development of reflective attention come the need and the possibility of a change in the mode of the child’s instruction. In the previous paragraphs we have been concerned with the direct, spontaneous attitude that marks the child till into his seventh year—his demand for new experiences and his desire to complete his partial experiences by building up images and expressing them in play. This attitude is typical of what writers call spontaneous attention, or, as some say, non-voluntary attention.
The child is simply absorbed in what he is doing; the occupation in which he is engaged lays complete hold upon him. He gives himself without reserve. Hence, while there is much energy spent, there is no _conscious_ effort; while the child is intent to the point of engrossment, there is no _conscious_ intention.
With the development of a sense of more remote ends, and of the need of directing acts so as to make them means for these ends (a matter discussed in the second number), we have the transition to what is termed indirect, or, as some writers prefer to say, voluntary, attention. A result is imaged, and the child attends to what is before him or what he is immediately doing because it helps to secure the result. Taken by itself, the object or the act might be indifferent or even repulsive. But because it is felt to belong to something desirable or valuable, it borrows the latter’s attracting and holding power.
This is the transition to “voluntary” attention, but only the transition. The latter comes fully into being only when the child entertains results in the form of problems or questions, the solution of which he is to seek for himself. In the intervening stage (in the child from eight to, say, eleven or twelve), while the child directs a series of intervening activities on the basis of some end he wishes to reach, this end is something to be done or made, or some tangible result to be reached; the problem is a practical difficulty, rather than an intellectual question. But with growing power the child can conceive of the end as something to be found out, discovered; and can control his acts and images so as to help in the inquiry and solution. This is reflective attention proper.
In history work there is change from the story and biography form, from discussion of questions that arise, to the formulation of questions. Points about which difference of opinion is possible, matters upon which experience, reflection, etc., can be brought to bear, are always coming up in history. But to use the discussion to develop this matter of doubt and difference into a definite problem, to bring the child to feel just what the difficulty is, and then throw him upon his own resources in looking up material bearing upon the point, and upon his judgment in bringing it to bear, or getting a solution, is a marked intellectual advance. So in the science there is a change from the practical attitude of making and using cameras to the consideration of the problems intellectually involved in this—to principles of light, angular measurements, etc., which give the theory or explanation of the practice.
In general, this growth is a natural process. But the proper recognition and use of it is perhaps the most serious problem in instruction upon the intellectual side. A person who has gained the power of reflective attention, the power to hold problems, questions, before the mind, _is_ in so far, intellectually speaking, educated. He has mental discipline—power _of_ the mind and _for_ the mind. Without this the mind remains at the mercy of custom and external suggestions. Some of the difficulties may be barely indicated by referring to an error that almost dominates instruction of the usual type. Too often it is assumed that attention can be given directly to any subject-matter, if only the proper will or disposition be at hand, failure being regarded as a sign of unwillingness or indocility. Lessons in arithmetic, geography, and grammar are put before the child, and he is told to attend in order to learn. But excepting as there is some question, some doubt, present in the mind as a _basis_ for this attention, _reflective_ attention is impossible. If there is sufficient _intrinsic_ interest in the material, there will be direct or spontaneous attention, which is excellent so far as it goes, but which merely of itself does not give power of thought or internal mental control. If there is not an inherent attracting power in the material, then (according to his temperament and training, and the precedents and expectations of the school) the teacher will either attempt to surround the material with foreign attractiveness, making a bid or offering a bribe for attention by “making the lesson interesting”; or else will resort to counterirritants (low marks, threats of non-promotion, staying after school, personal disapprobation, expressed in a great variety of ways, naggings, continuous calling upon the child to “pay attention,” etc.); or, probably, will use some of both means.