Where the climate and products of the British Isles have been studied in political geography, and later on, in physical geography, the gulf stream is explained in its bearings on the climate of western Europe, the whole subject of the climate of England is viewed from a new and interesting standpoint. In arithmetic, where the sum of the squares of the two sides of a right-angled triangle is illustrated by an example and later on in geometry the same proposition is taken up in a different way and proved as a universal theorem, new and interesting light is thrown upon an old problem of arithmetic. In United States history, after the Revolution has been studied, the biography of a man like Samuel Adams throws much additional and vivid light upon the events and actors in Boston and Massachusetts. The life of John Adams would give a still different view of the same great events; just as a city, as seen from different standpoints, presents different aspects.
3. We have thus far shown that new ideas are more easily understood and assimilated when they are brought into close contact with what we already know; and secondly, that our old knowledge is often explained and illuminated by new facts brought to bear upon it. We may now observe the result of this double action—the welding of old and new into one piece, the close mingling and association of all our knowledge, i.e., its unity. Apperception, therefore, has the same final tendency that was observed in the inductive process, the unification of knowledge, the concentration of all experience by uniting its parts into groups and series. The smith, in welding together two pieces of iron, heats both and then hammers them together into one piece. The teacher has something similar to do. He must revive old ideas in the child's mind, then present the new facts and bring the two things together while they are still fresh, so as to cause them to coalesce. To prove this observe how long division may be best taught. Call up and review the method of short division, then proceed to work a problem in long division calling attention to the similar steps and processes in the two, and finally to the difference between them.
The defect of much teaching in children's classes is that the teacher does not properly provide for the welding together of the new and old. The important practical question after all is whether instructors see to it that children recall their previous knowledge. It is necessary to take special pains in this. Nothing is more common than to find children forgetting the very thing which, if remembered, would explain the difficult point in the lesson. Teachers are often surprised that children have forgotten things once learned. But, in an important sense, we encourage children to forget by not calling into use their acquisitions. Lessons are learned too much, each by itself, without reference to what precedes or what follows, or what effect this lesson of to-day may have upon things learned a year ago. Putting it briefly, children and teachers do not think enough, pondering things over in their minds, relating facts with each other, and bringing all knowledge into unity, and into a clear comprehension. The habit of thoughtfulness, engendered by a proper combining of old and new, is one of the valuable results of a good education. It gives the mind a disposition to glance backward or forward, to judge of all old ideas from a broader, more intelligent standpoint. Thinking everything over in the light of the best experience we can bring to bear upon it, prevents us from jumping at conclusions.
The general plan of all studies is based upon this notion of acquiring knowledge by the assistance of accumulated funds. In Arithmetic it would be folly to begin with long division before the multiplication table is learned. In Geometry, later propositions depend upon earlier principles and demonstrations. In Latin, vocabularies and inflections and syntactical relations must be mastered before readiness in the use of language is reached. And so it is to a large degree in the general plan of all studies. In spite of this no principle is more commonly violated in daily recitations than that of apperception. Its value is self-evident as a principle for the arrangement of topics in any branch of study, but it is overlooked in daily lessons. Instead of this new knowledge is acquired by a thoughtless memory drill.
In this welding process we desire to determine how far an actual concentration may take place between school studies and the home and outside life of children. The stock of ideas and feelings which a child from its infancy has gathered from its peculiar history and home surroundings is the primitive basis of its personality. Its thought, feeling, and individuality are deeply interwoven with home experience. No other set of ideas, later acquired, lies so close to its heart or is so abiding in its memory. The memory of work and play at home; of the house, yard, trees, and garden; of parents, brothers, and sisters, and in addition to this the experiences connected with neighbors and friends, the town and surrounding country, the church and its influence, the holidays, games, and celebrations, all these things lie deeper in the minds of children than the facts learned about grammar, geography, or history in school. Any plan of education that ignores these home-bred ideas, these events, memories, and sympathies of home and neighborhood life, will make a vital mistake. A concentration that keeps in mind only the school studies and disregards the rich funds of ideas that every child brings from his home, must be a failure, because it only includes the weaker half of his experience. Home knowledge itself does not need to be made a concentrating center, but all its best materials must be drawn into the concentrating center of the school. But children bring many faulty, mistaken, and even vicious ideas from their homes. It is well to know the actual situation. It is the work of the school, at every step, while receiving, to correct, enlarge, or arrange the faulty or disordered knowledge brought into the school by children. We unconsciously use these materials, and depend upon them for explaining new lessons, more constantly than we are aware of. In fact, if we were wise teachers, we would consciously make a more frequent use of them and, in order to render them more valuable, take special pains to review, correct, and arrange them. We would teach children to observe more closely and to remember better the things they daily see.
We shall appreciate better the value of home knowledge if we take note of the direct and constant dependence of the most important studies upon it. We usually think of history as something far away in New England, or France, or Egypt. History is mainly the study of the actions, customs, homes, and institutions of men in different countries. But what an abundance of similar facts and observations a child has gathered about home before he begins the study of history. From his infancy he has seen people of all sorts and conditions, rich and poor, ignorant and learned, honorable and mean. He has seen all sorts of human actions, learned to know their meaning and to pass judgment upon them. He has seen houses, churches, public buildings, trade and commerce, and a hundred human institutions. The child has been studying human actions and institutions in the concrete for a dozen years before he begins to read and recite history from books. Without the knowledge thus acquired out of school, society, government, and institutions would be worse than Greek. Geography as taught in the books would be totally foreign and strange but for the abundance of ideas the child has already picked up about hills, streams, roads, travel, storms, trees, animals, and people.
Natural science lessons must be based on a more careful study of things already seen about home—rocks and streams, flowers and plants, animals wild and tame. These with the forests, fields, brooks, seasons, tools, and inventions, are the necessary object lessons in natural science which can serve daily to illustrate other lessons. How near then do the natural science topics, geography and history, stand to the daily home life of a child! How intimate should be the relations which the school should establish between the parts of a child's experience! This is concentration in the broadest sense. A proper appreciation of this principle will save us from a number of common errors. Besides constantly associating home and school knowledge, we shall try to know the home and parents better, and the disposition and surroundings of each child. We shall be ready at any time to render home knowledge more clear and accurate, to correct faulty observation and opinion. While the children will be encouraged to illustrate lessons from their own experience, we shall fall into the excellent habit of explaining new and difficult points by a direct appeal to what the pupils have seen and understood. In short, there will be a disposition to draw into the concentrating work of the school all the deeper but outside life-experiences which form so important an element in the character of every person, which, however, teachers so often overlook. No other institution has such an opportunity or power to concentrate knowledge and experience as the school.
4. Another valuable educative result of apperception, cultivated in this manner, is a consciousness of power which springs from the ability to make a good use of our knowledge. The oftener children become aware that they have made a good use of acquired knowledge, the more they are encouraged. They see the treasure growing in their hands and feel conscious of their ability to use it. There is a mental exhilaration like that coming from abundant physical strength and health.
"Let us look back again at the results of our investigation. We observed first what essential services apperception performs for the human mind in the acquisition of new ideas, and for what an extraordinary easement and unburdening the acquiring soul is indebted to it. Should apperception once fail, or were it not implied in the very nature of our minds, we should, in the reception of sense-impressions, daily expend as much power as the child in its earliest years, since the perpetually changing objects of the external world would nearly always appear strange and new. We should gain the mastery of external things more slowly and painfully, and arrive much later at a certain conclusion of our external experience than we do now, and thereby remain perceptibly behind in our mental development. Like children with their A B C, we should be forced to take careful note of each word, and not, as now, allow ourselves actually to perceive only a few words in each sentence. In a word, without apperception our minds, with strikingly greater and more exhaustive labor, would attain relatively smaller results. Indeed, we are seldom conscious of the extent to which our perception is supported by apperception; of how it releases the senses from a large part of their labor, so that in reality we listen usually with half an ear or with a divided attention; nor, on the other hand, do we ordinarily reflect that apperception lends the sense organs a greater degree of energy, so that they perceive with greater sharpness and penetration than were otherwise possible. We do not consider that apperception spares us the trouble of examining ever anew and in small detail all the objects and phenomena that present themselves to us, so as to get their meaning, or that it thus prevents our mental power from scattering and from being worn out with wearisome, fruitless detail labors. The secret of its extraordinary success lies in the fact that it refers the new to the old, the strange to the familiar, the unknown to the known, that which is not comprehended to what is already understood and thus constitutes a part of our mental furniture; that it transforms the difficult and unaccustomed into the accustomed and causes us to grasp everything new by means of old-time, well-known, ideas. Since, then, it accomplishes great and unusual results by small means, in so far as it reserves for the soul the greatest amount of power for other purposes, it agrees with the general principle of the least expenditure of force, or with that of the best adaptability of means to ends.
"As in the reception of new impressions, so also in working over and developing the previously acquired content of the mind, the helpful work of apperception shows itself. By connecting isolated things with mental groups already formed, and by assigning to the new its proper place among them, apperception not only increases the clearness and definiteness of ideas, but knits them more firmly to our consciousness. Apperceiving ideas are the best aids to memory. Again, so often as it subordinates new impressions to older ones, it labors at the association and articulation of the manifold materials of perception and thought. By condensing the content of observation and thinking into concepts and rules, or general experiences and principles, or ideals and general notions, apperception produces connection and order in our knowledge and volition. With its assistance there spring up those universal thought complexes, which, distributed to the various fields to which they belong, appear as logical, linguistic, aesthetic, moral, and religious norms or principles. If these acquire a higher degree of value for our feelings, if we find ourselves heartily attached to them, so that we prefer them to all those things which are contradictory, if we bind them to our own self, they will thus become powerful mental groups, which spring up independent of the psychical mechanism as often as kindred ideas appear in the mind. In the presence of these they now make manifest their apperceiving power. We measure and estimate them now according to universal laws. They are, so to speak, the eyes and hand of the will, with which, regulating and supplementing, rejecting and correcting, it lays a grasp upon the content as well as upon the succession of ideas. They hinder the purely mechanical flow of thought and desire, and our involuntary absorption in external impressions and in the varied play of fancy. We learn how to control religious impulses by laws, to rule thoughts by thoughts. In the place of the mechanical, appears the regulated course of thinking; in the place of the psychical rule of caprice, the monarchical control of higher laws and principles, and the spontaneity of the ego as the kernel of the personality. By the aid of apperception, therefore, we are lifted gradually from psychical bondage to mental and moral freedom. And now when ideal norms are apperceivingly active in the field of knowledge and thought, of feeling and will, when they give laws to the psychical mechanism, true culture is attained." (Lange's Apperception, edited by DeGarmo, p. 99, etc.)