The Story of the Mind

by James Mark Baldwin

Now what shall be done with such a student in his early school years? This is a question for the secondary teacher especially, apart from the more primary measures recommended above. It is in the years between eight and fifteen that this type of mind has its rapid development; before that the treatment is mainly preventive, and consists largely in suggestions which aim to make the muscular discharges more deliberate and the general tone less explosive. But when the boy or girl comes to school with the dawning capacity for independent self-direction and personal application, then it is that the problem of the motor scholar becomes critical. The "let-alone" method puts a premium upon the development of his tendencies and the eventual playing out of his mental possibilities in mere motion. Certain positive ways of giving some indirect discipline to the mind of this type may be suggested.

Give this student relatively difficult and complex tasks. There is no way to hinder his exuberant self-discharges except by measures which embarrass and baffle him. We can not "lead him into all truth"; we have to drive him back from all error. The lessons of psychology are to the effect that the normal way to teach caution and deliberation is the way of failure, repulse, and unfortunate, even painful, consequences. Personal appeals to him do little good, since it is a part of his complaint that he is too ready to hear all appeals; and also, since he is not aware of his own lack nor able to carry what he hears into effect. So keep him in company of scholars a little more advanced than he is. Keep him out of the concert recitations, where his tendency to haste would work both personal and social harm. Refrain from giving him assistance in his tasks until he has learned from them something of the real lesson of discouragement, and then help him only by degrees, and by showing him one step at a time, with constant renewals of his own efforts. Shield him with the greatest pains from distractions of all kinds, for even the things and events about him may carry his attention off at the most critical moments. Give him usually the secondary parts in the games of the school, except when real planning, complex execution, and more or less generalship are required; then give him the leading parts: they exercise his activities in new ways not covered by habit, and if he do not rise to their complexity, then the other party to the sport will, and his haste will have its own punishment, and so be a lesson to him.

Besides these general checks and regulations, there remains the very important question as to what studies are most available for this type of mind. I have intimated already the general answer that ought to be given to this question. The aim of the studies of the motor student should be discipline in the direction of correct generalization, and, as helpful to this, discipline in careful observation of concrete facts. On the other hand, the studies which involve principles simply of a descriptive kind should have little place in his daily study. They call out largely the more mechanical operations of memory, and their command can be secured for the most part by mere repetition of details all similar in character and of equal value. The measure of the utility to him of the different studies of the schoolroom is found in the relative demand they make upon him to modify his hasty personal reactions, to suspend his thoughtless rush to general results, and back of it all, to hold the attention long enough upon the facts as they arise to get some sense of the logical relationships which bind them together. Studies which do not afford any logical relationships, and which tend, on the contrary, to foster the habit of learning by repetition, only tend to fix the student in the quality of attention which I have called "fluidity."

In particular, therefore: give this student all the mathematics he can absorb, and pass him from arithmetic into geometry, leaving his algebra till later. Give him plenty of grammar, taught inductively. Start him early in the elements of physics and chemistry. And as opposed to this, keep him out of the classes of descriptive botany and zoölogy. Rather let him join exploring parties for the study of plants, stones, and animals. A few pet animals are a valuable adjunct to any school museum. If there be an industrial school or machine shop near at hand, try to get him interested in the way things are made, and encourage him to join in such employments. A false generalization in the wheels of a cart supplies its own corrective very quickly, or in the rigging and sails of a toy boat. Drawing from models is a fine exercise for such a youth, and drawing from life, as soon as he gets a little advanced in the control of his pencil. All this, it is easy to see, trains his impulsive movements into some degree of subjection to the deliberative processes.

With this general line of treatment in mind, the details of which the reader will work out in the light of the boy's type, space allows me only two more points before I pass to the sensory scholar.

First, in all the teaching of the type of mind now in question, pursue a method which proceeds from the particular to the general. The discussion of pedagogical method with all its ins and outs needs to take cognizance of the differences of students in their type. The motor student should never, in normal cases, be given a general formula and told to work out particular instances; that is too much his tendency already—to approach facts from the point of view of their resemblances. What he needs rather is a sense of the dignity of the single fact, and of the necessity of giving it its separate place, before hastening on to lose it in the flow of a general statement. So whether the teacher have in hand mathematics, grammar, or science, let him disclose the principles only gradually, and always only so far as they are justified by the observations which the boy has been led to make for himself. For the reason that such a method is practically impossible in the descriptive sciences, and some other branches, as taught in the schoolbooks—botany, zoölogy, and, worse than all, history and geography—we should restrict their part in the discipline studies of such a youth. They require simple memory, without observation, and put a premium on hasty and temporary acquisition.

As I have said, algebra should be subordinated to geometry. Algebra has as its distinctive method the principle of substitution, whereby symbols of equal and, for the most part, absolute generality are substituted for one another, and the results stand for one fact as well as for another, in disregard of the worth of the particular in the scheme of nature. For the same reason, deductive logic is not a good discipline for these students; empirical psychology, or political economy, is a better introduction to the moral sciences for them when they reach the high school. This explains what was meant above in the remark as to the method of teaching grammar. As to language study generally, I think the value of it, at this period, and later, is extraordinarily overrated. The proportion of time given to language study in our secondary schools is nothing short of a public crime in its effect upon students of this type—and indeed of any type. This, however, is a matter to which we return below. The average student comes to college with his sense of exploration, his inductive capacity, stifled at its birth. He stands appalled when confronted with the unassimilated details of any science which does not give him a "key" in the shape of general formulas made up beforehand. Were it not that his enlarging experience of life is all the while running counter to the trend of his so-called education, he would probably graduate ready for the social position in which authority takes the place of evidence, and imitation is the method of life.

Second, the teacher should be on the lookout for a tendency which is very characteristic of a student of this type, the tendency, i. e., to fall into elaborate guessing at results. Take a little child of about seven or eight years of age, especially one who has the marks of motor heredity, and observe the method of his acquisition of new words in reading. First he speaks the word which his habit dictates, and, that being wrong, he rolls his eyes away from the text and makes a guess of the first word that comes into his mind; this he keeps up as long as the teacher persists in asking him to try again. Here is the same tendency that carries him later on in his education to a general conclusion by a short cut. He has not learned to interpret the data of a deliberate judgment, and his attention does not dwell on the necessary details. So with him all through his training; he is always ready with a guess. Here, again, the teacher can do him good only by patiently employing the inductive method. Lead him back to the simplest elements of the problem in hand, and help him gradually to build up a result step by step.

I think in this, as in most of the work with these scholars, the association with children of the opposite type is one of the best correctives, provided the companionship is not made altogether one-sided by the motor boy's perpetual monopolizing of all the avenues of personal expression. When he fails in the class, the kind of social lesson which is valuable may be taught him by submitting the same question to a pupil of the plodding, deliberate kind, and waiting for the latter to work it out. Of course, if the teacher have any supervision over the playground, similar treatment can be employed there.

Coming to consider the so-called "sensory" youth of the age between eight, let us say, and sixteen—the age during which the training of the secondary school presents its great problems—we find certain interesting contrasts between this type and that already characterized as "motor." The study of this type of youth is the more pressing for reasons which I have already hinted in considering the same type in the earlier childhood period. It is necessary, first, to endeavour to get a fairly adequate view of the psychological characteristics of this sort of pupil.