Talks to Teachers on Psychology

A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to examine a young class in geography. Glancing, at the book, she said: “Suppose you should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you find it at the bottom, — warmer or colder than on top?” None of the class replying, the teacher said: “I’m sure they know, but I think you don’t ask the question quite rightly. Let me try.” So, taking the book, she asked: “In what condition is the interior of the globe?” and received the immediate answer from half the class at once: “The interior of the globe is in a condition of igneous fusion.” Better exclusive object-teaching than such verbal recitations as that; and yet verbal reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective work, must always play a leading, and surely the leading, part in education. Our modern reformers, in their books, write too exclusively of the earliest years of the pupil. These lend themselves better to explicit treatment; and I myself, in dwelling so much upon the native impulses, and object-teaching, and anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to the line of least resistance in describing. Yet away back in childhood we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the intelligence of abstract terms. The object- teaching is mainly to launch the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts concerned, upon the more abstract ideas.