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.
[XIII. THE ACQUISITION OF IDEAS]
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.