Скачать книгу

but it is worse than nothing. It dissipates energy, and forms a habit of dependence upon such meaningless excitations, a habit most adverse to sustained thought and endeavor. Wherever such practices are resorted to in the name of interest, they very properly bring it into disrepute. It is not enough to catch attention; it must be held. It does not suffice to arouse energy; the course that energy takes, the results that it effects are the important matters.

      But since activities, even those originally impulsive, are more or less continuous or enduring, such static, non-developing excitements, represent not interest, but an abnormal set of conditions. The positive contributions of the idea of interest to pedagogic theory are twofold. In the first place, it protects us from a merely internal conception of mind; and, in the second place, from a merely external conception of subject-matter.

      (2) The supposed externality of subject-matter is but the counterpart phase of the alleged internal isolation of mind. If mind means certain powers or faculties existing in themselves and needing only to be exercised by and upon presented subject-matter, the presented subject-matter must mean something complete in its ready-made and fixed separateness. Objects, facts, truths of geography, history, and science not being conceived as means and ends for the intelligent development of experience, are thought of just as stuff to be learned. Reading, writing, figuring are mere external forms of skill to be mastered. Even the arts—drawing, singing—are thought of as meaning so many ready-made things, pictures, songs, that are to be externally produced and reproduced. Then we have the situation described in the early portion of this essay: Some means must be found to overcome the separation of mind and subject-matter; problems of method in teaching are reduced to various ways of overcoming a gap which exists only because a radically wrong method had already been entered upon. The doctrine of interest is not a short cut to "methods" of this sort. On the contrary, it is a warning to furnish conditions such that the natural impulses and acquired habits, as far as they are desirable, shall obtain subject-matter and modes of skill in order to develop to their natural ends of achievement and efficiency. Interest, the identification of mind with the material and methods of a developing activity, is the inevitable result of the presence of such situations.

      Hence it follows that little can be accomplished by setting up "interest" as an end or a method by itself. Interest is obtained not by thinking about it and consciously aiming at it, but by considering and aiming at the conditions that lie back of it, and compel it. If we can discover a child's urgent needs and powers, and if we can supply an environment of materials, appliances, and resources—physical, social, and intellectual—to direct their adequate operation, we shall not have to think about interest. It will take care of itself. For mind will have met with what it needs in order to be mind. The problem of educators, teachers, parents, the state, is to provide the environment that induces educative or developing activities, and where these are found the one thing needful in education is secured.

      1. Of course, nothing that is said here is meant to depreciate the wonderful possibilities involved in an imaginative experimentation with things, after the conditions of more direct transactions with them have been met.

      Outline

       Table of Contents

      I. UNIFIED VERSUS DIVIDED ACTIVITY.

      1 The educational lawsuit of interest versus effort

      2 The case against the current theory of effort

      3 The case against the current theory of interest

      4 Each is strong in its attacks upon the opposite theory

      5 Both fail to recognize the identity of facts and actions with the self

      6 Both are intellectually and morally harmful

      7 The child's demand for realization of his own impulses cannot be suppressed

      8 Emphasizing outward habits of action leaves the child's inner nature to its caprices

      9 Making things interesting substitutes the pleasure of excitation for that of activity

      10 The result is division of energies(a) In disagreeable effort it is simultaneous(b) In adventitious interest it is successive

      11 When properly conceived, interest and effort are vitally related

      II. INTEREST AS DIRECT AND INDIRECT

      1 A brief descriptive account of interest

      2 The active or propulsive phase

      3 The objective phase

      4 The emotional phase

      5 Interest is primarily a form of self-expressive activity

      6 Direct or immediated interest

      7 Indirect, transferred or mediated interest

      8 Two thoroughgoing errors(a) Selecting subject-matter regardless of interest(b) Making method a device for dressing up unrelated materials

      9 The criterion for judging cases of transferred interest(a) Are means and ends intrinsically connected?(b) Two illustrative cases

      10 Means and end are stages of a single developing activity(a) Three illustrations

      11 Failure follows the appeal to adventitious or substituted interests

      12 The true relation of subject-matter and the child's activities

      13 Consequences of this view for pleasure and happiness

      14 There is no rigid line between direct and indirect interests

      15 Indirect interests are symptomatic of the expansion of simple activities into more complex ones

      16 Indirect values become direct

      17 Interest is legitimate only when it fosters development

      18 Genuine interest

Скачать книгу