Who has not experienced that feeling of hopelessness and despair that comes at these successive levels of the long process of acquiring skill in a complicated art? How desperately we struggle on—striving to put every item of energy that we can command into our work, and yet feeling how hopeless it all seems. How tempting then is the hammock on the porch, the fascinating novel that we have placed on our bedside table, the happy company of friends that are talking and laughing in the next room; or how we long for the green fields and the open road; how seductive is that siren call of change and diversion,—that evil spirit of procrastination! How feeble, too, are the efforts that we make under these conditions! We are not making progress in our art, we are only marking time. And yet the psychologists tell us that this marking time is an essential in the mastery of any complicated art. Somewhere, deep down in the nervous system, subtle processes are at work, and when finally interest dawns,—when finally hope returns to us, and life again becomes worth while,—these heartbreaking struggles reap their reward. The psychologists call them "plateaus of growth," but some one has said that "sloughs of despond" would be a far better designation.
The progress of any individual depends upon his ability to pass through these sloughs of despond,—to set his face resolutely to the task and persevere. It would be the idlest folly to lead children to believe that success or achievement or even passing ability can be gained in any other manner. And this is the danger in the sugar-coating process.
But motivation does not mean sugar-coating. It means the development of purpose, of ambition, of incentive. It means the development of the willingness to undergo the discipline in order that the purpose may be realized, in order that the goal may be attained. It means the creating of those conditions that make for strength and virility and moral fiber,—for it is in the consciousness of having overcome obstacles and won in spite of handicaps,—it is in this consciousness of conquest that mental strength and moral strength have their source. The victory that really strengthens one is not the victory that has come easily, but the victory that stands out sharp and clear against the background of effort and struggle. It is because this subjective contrast is so absolutely essential to the consciousness of power,—it is for this reason that the "sloughs of despond" still have their function in our new attitude toward drill.
But do not mistake me: I have no sympathy with that educational "stand-pattism" that would multiply these needlessly, or fail to build solid and comfortable highways across them wherever it is possible to do so. I have no sympathy with that philosophy of education which approves the placing of artificial barriers in the learner's path. But if I build highways across the morasses, it is only that youth may the more readily traverse the region and come the more quickly to the points where struggle is absolutely necessary.
You remember in George Eliot's Daniel Deronda the story of Gwendolen Harleth. Gwendolen was a butterfly of society, a young woman in whose childhood drill and discipline had found no place. In early womanhood, she was, through family misfortune, thrown upon her own resources. In casting about for some means of self-support her first recourse was to music, for which she had some taste and in which she had had some slight training. She sought out her old German music teacher, Klesmer, and asked him what she might do to turn this taste and this training to financial account. Klesmer's reply sums up in a nutshell the psychology of skill:
"Any great achievement in acting or in music grows with the growth. Whenever an artist has been able to say, 'I came, I saw, I conquered,' it has been at the end of patient practice. Genius, at first, is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline. Singing and acting, like the fine dexterity of the juggler with his cup and balls, require a shaping of the organs toward a finer and finer certainty of effect. Your muscles, your whole frame, must go like a watch,—true, true, true, to a hair. This is the work of the springtime of life before the habits have been formed."
And I can formulate my own conception of the work of habit building in education no better than by paraphrasing Klesmer's epigram. To increase in our pupils the capacity to receive discipline; to show them, through concrete example, over and over again, how persistence and effort and concentration bring results that are worth while; to choose from their own childish experiences the illustrations that will force this lesson home; to supplement, from the stories of great achievements, those illustrations which will inspire them to effort; to lead them to see that Peary conquering the Pole, or Wilbur Wright perfecting the aëroplane, or Morse struggling through long years of hopelessness and discouragement to give the world the electric telegraph,—to show them that these men went through experiences differing only in degree and not in kind from those which characterize every achievement, no matter how small, so long as it is dominated by a unitary purpose; to make the inevitable sloughs of despond no less morasses, perhaps, but to make their conquest add a permanent increment to growth and development: this is the task of our drill work as I view it. As the prophecy of Isaiah has it: "Precept must be upon precept; precept upon precept; line upon line; line upon line; here a little and there a little." And if we can succeed in giving our pupils this vision,—if we can reveal the deeper meaning of struggle and effort and self-denial and sacrifice shining out through the little details of the day's work,—we are ourselves achieving something that is richly worth while; for the highest triumph of the teacher's art is to get his pupils to see, in the small and seemingly trivial affairs of everyday life, the operation of fundamental and eternal principles.
FOOTNOTES:
[17] An address before the Kansas State Teachers' Association, Topeka, October 20, 1910.