"You're talking pure balderdash!" said Macdonald, leaning forward to knock the ashes from his pipe on the bars of the grate.
"Very well," I said cheerfully. "Let's discuss it. You make a class sit in front of you for an hour, and you threaten to whack the first child that doesn't pay attention to your lesson on nouns and pronouns."
"Discipline," said Macdonald.
"I don't care what you call it. I say it's stupidity."
"But, hang it all, man, you can't teach if you haven't got the children's attention."
"And you can't teach when you have got it," I said. "A child learns only when it is interested."
"But surely, discipline makes them interested," said Mrs. Macdonald.
I shook my head. "It only makes them attentive."
"Same thing," said Macdonald.
"No, Mac," I replied. "It is not the same thing. Attention means the applying of the conscious mind to a thing; interest means the application of both the conscious and the unconscious mind. When you force a child to attend to a lesson for fear of the tawse, you merely engage the least important part of his mind—the conscious. While he stares at the blackboard his unconscious is concerned with other things."