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The work is a collection of public lectures William James delivered at the request of the Harvard Corporation in 1892, later expanded for various teacher audiences and for women's college graduates. Framed as “talks to teachers” and “talks to students,” the book eschews dense technical jargon in favor of concrete, practical applications of psychology to the classroom. James explicitly states that he has stripped away the “analytical technicality” that his listeners disliked, leaving only the minimal scientific content necessary to help teachers imagine the mental life of their pupils as a unified whole. The opening sections outline topics such as habit formation, attention, memory, and the role of native and acquired reactions, all presented as guiding principles rather than prescriptive formulas.
Written in the earnest, conversational style of late‑nineteenth‑century American scholarship, the text reflects the period’s confidence in progress and the democratic ideal of respecting individuality. Readers who appreciate a philosophically informed yet accessible discussion of educational psychology, particularly teachers, education students, or anyone interested in the historical roots of modern pedagogy, will find James’s blend of empirical observation and moral reflection engaging.
The opening · free to read
PREFACE.
In 1892 I was asked by the Harvard Corporation to give a few public lectures on psychology to the Cambridge teachers. The talks now printed form the substance of that course, which has since then been delivered at various places to various teacher-audiences. I have found by experience that what my hearers seem least to relish is analytical technicality, and what they most care for is concrete practical application. So I have gradually weeded out the former, and left the latter unreduced; and now, that I have at last written out the lectures, they contain a minimum of what is deemed 'scientific' in psychology, and are practical and popular in the extreme.
Some of my colleagues may possibly shake their heads at this; but in taking my cue from what has seemed to me to be the feeling of the audiences I believe that I am shaping my book so as to satisfy the more genuine public need.
Teachers, of course, will miss the minute divisions, subdivisions, and definitions, the lettered and numbered headings, the variations of type, and all the other mechanical artifices on which they are accustomed to prop their minds. But my main desire has been to make them conceive, and, if possible, reproduce sympathetically in their imagination, the mental life of their pupil as the sort of active unity which he himself feels it to be. He doesn't chop himself into distinct processes and compartments; and it would have frustrated this deeper purpose of my book to make it look, when printed, like a Baedeker's handbook of travel or a text-book of arithmetic. So far as books printed like this book force the fluidity of the facts upon the young teacher's attention, so far I am sure they tend to do his intellect a service, even though they may leave unsatisfied a craving (not altogether without its legitimate grounds) for more nomenclature, head-lines, and subdivisions.
Readers acquainted with my larger books on Psychology will meet much familiar phraseology. In the chapters on habit and memory I have even copied several pages verbatim, but I do not know that apology is needed for such plagiarism as this.
The talks to students, which conclude the volume, were written in response to invitations to deliver 'addresses' to students at women's colleges. The first one was to the graduating class of the Boston Normal School of Gymnastics. Properly, it continues the series of talks to teachers. The second and the third address belong together, and continue another line of thought.
I wish I were able to make the second, 'On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,' more impressive. It is more than the mere piece of sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connects itself with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume of philosophic essays will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or individualistic philosophy. According to that philosophy, the truth is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed 'the Absolute,' to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view absolutely public and universal. Private and uncommunicable perceptions always remain over, and the worst of it is that those who look for them from the outside never know where.
The practical consequence of such a philosophy is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of individuality,--is, at any rate, the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intolerant. These phrases are so familiar that they sound now rather dead in our ears. Once they had a passionate inner meaning. Such a passionate inner meaning they may easily acquire again if the pretension of our nation to inflict its own inner ideals and institutions vi et armis upon Orientals should meet with a resistance as obdurate as so far it has been gallant and spirited. Religiously and philosophically, our ancient national doctrine of live and let live may prove to have a far deeper meaning than our people now seem to imagine it to possess.
CAMBRIDGE, MASS., March, 1899.
CONTENTS.
TALKS TO TEACHERS.
The American educational organization,--What teachers may expect from psychology,--Teaching methods must agree with psychology, but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom,--The science of teaching and the science of war,--The educational uses of psychology defined,--The teacher's duty toward child-study.
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.
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.
The acquired reactions must be preceded by native ones,--Illustration: teaching child to ask instead of snatching,--Man has more instincts than other mammals.
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.
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.
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, nowhere else to be found on such an important scale. The independence of so many of the colleges and universities; the give and take of students and instructors between them all; their emulation, and their happy organic relations to the lower schools; the traditions of instruction in them, evolved from the older American recitation-method (and so avoiding on the one hand the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the English tutorial system would seem too often to entail),--all these things (to say nothing of that coeducation of the sexes in whose benefits so many of us heartily believe), all these things, I say, are most happy features of our scholastic life, and from them the most sanguine auguries may be drawn.
Having so favorable an organization, all we need is to impregnate it with geniuses, to get superior men and women working more and more abundantly in it and for it and at it, and in a generation or two America may well lead the education of the world. I must say that I look forward with no little confidence to the day when that shall be an accomplished fact.
No one has profited more by the fermentation of which I speak, in pedagogical circles, than we psychologists. The desire of the schoolteachers for a completer professional training, and their aspiration toward the 'professional' spirit in their work, have led them more and more to turn to us for light on fundamental principles. And in these few hours which we are to spend together you look to me, I am sure, for information concerning the mind's operations, which may enable you to labor more easily and effectively in the several schoolrooms over which you preside.
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