10.
CHAPTER X
INTEREST AND DISCIPLINE:
1. The Meaning of the Terms.
— We have already noticed the difference in the attitude of a
spectator and of an agent or participant. The former is indifferent to
what is going on; one result is just as good as another, since each is
just something to look at. The latter is bound up with what is going
on; its outcome makes a difference to him. His fortunes are more or
less at stake in the issue of events. Consequently he does whatever he
can to influence the direction present occurrences take. One is like a
man in a prison cell watching the rain out of the window; it is all the
same to him. The other is like a man who has planned an outing for the
next day which continuing rain will frustrate. He cannot, to be sure,
by his present reactions affect to-morrow's weather, but he may take
some steps which will influence future happenings, if only to postpone
the proposed picnic. If a man sees a carriage coming which may run over
him, if he cannot stop its movement, he can at least get out of the way
if he foresees the consequence in time. In many instances, he can
intervene even more directly. The attitude of a participant in the
course of affairs is thus a double one: there is solicitude, anxiety
concerning future consequences, and a tendency to act to assure better,
and avert worse, consequences.
There are words which denote this attitude: concern, interest. These
words suggest that a person is bound up with the possibilities inhering
in objects; that he is accordingly on the lookout for what they are
likely to do to him; and that, on the basis of his expectation or
foresight, he is eager to act so as to give things one turn rather than
another. Interest and aims, concern and purpose, are necessarily
connected. Such words as aim, intent, end, emphasize the results
which are wanted and striven for; they take for granted the personal
attitude of solicitude and attentive eagerness. Such words as interest,
affection, concern, motivation, emphasize the bearing of what is
foreseen upon the individual's fortunes, and his active desire to act to
secure a possible result. They take for granted the objective changes.
But the difference is but one of emphasis; the meaning that is shaded in
one set of words is illuminated in the other. What is anticipated
is objective and impersonal; to-morrow's rain; the possibility of being
run over. But for an active being, a being who partakes of the consequences
instead of standing aloof from them, there is at the same time a
personal response. The difference imaginatively foreseen makes a
present difference, which finds expression in solicitude and effort.
While such words as affection, concern, and motive indicate an attitude
of personal preference, they are always attitudes toward
objects—toward what is foreseen. We may call the phase of
objective foresight intellectual, and the phase of personal concern
emotional and volitional, but there is no separation in the facts of the
situation.
Such a separation could exist only if the personal attitudes ran their
course in a world by themselves. But they are always responses to what
is going on in the situation of which they are a part, and their
successful or unsuccessful expression depends upon their interaction
with other changes. Life activities flourish and fail only in
connection with changes of the environment. They are literally bound up
with these changes; our desires, emotions, and affections are but
various ways in which our doings are tied up with the doings of things
and persons about us. Instead of marking a purely personal or
subjective realm, separated from the objective and impersonal, they
indicate the non-existence of such a separate world. They afford
convincing evidence that changes in things are not alien to the
activities of a self, and that the career and welfare of the self are
bound up with the movement of persons and things. Interest, concern,
mean that self and world are engaged with each other in a developing
situation.
The word interest, in its ordinary usage, expresses (i) the whole state
of active development, (ii) the objective results that are foreseen and
wanted, and (iii) the personal emotional inclination. (i) An
occupation, employment, pursuit, business is often referred to as an
interest. Thus we say that a man's interest is politics, or journalism,
or philanthropy, or archaeology, or collecting Japanese prints, or
banking. (ii) By an interest we also mean the point at which an object
touches or engages a man; the point where it influences him. In some
legal transactions a man has to prove "interest" in order to have a
standing at court. He has to show that some proposed step concerns his
affairs. A silent partner has an interest in a business, although he
takes no active part in its conduct because its prosperity or decline
affects his profits and liabilities. (iii) When we speak of a man as
interested in this or that the emphasis falls directly upon his personal
attitude. To be interested is to be absorbed in, wrapped up in, carried
away by, some object. To take an interest is to be on the alert, to
care about, to be attentive. We say of an interested person both that
he has lost himself in some affair and that he has found himself in it.
Both terms express the engrossment of the self in an object.
When the place of interest in education is spoken of in a depreciatory
way, it will be found that the second of the meanings mentioned is first
exaggerated and then isolated. Interest is taken to mean merely the
effect of an object upon personal advantage or disadvantage, success or
failure. Separated from any objective development of affairs, these are
reduced to mere personal states of pleasure or pain. Educationally, it
then follows that to attach importance to interest means to attach some
feature of seductiveness to material otherwise indifferent; to secure
attention and effort by offering a bribe of pleasure. This procedure is
properly stigmatized as "soft" pedagogy; as a "soup-kitchen" theory of
education.
But the objection is based upon the fact—or assumption—that
the forms of skill to be acquired and the subject matter to be
appropriated have no interest on their own account: in other words, they
are supposed to be irrelevant to the normal activities of the pupils.
The remedy is not in finding fault with the doctrine of interest, any
more than it is to search for some pleasant bait that may be hitched to
the alien material.
It is to discover objects and modes of action, which are connected with
present powers. The function of this material in engaging activity and
carrying it on consistently and continuously is its interest. If the
material operates in this way, there is no call either to hunt for
devices which will make it interesting or to appeal to arbitrary,
semi-coerced effort.
The word interest suggests, etymologically, what is between,—that
which connects two things otherwise distant. In education, the distance
covered may be looked at as temporal. The fact that a process takes
time to mature is so obvious a fact that we rarely make it explicit. We
overlook the fact that in growth there is ground to be covered between
an initial stage of process and the completing period; that there is
something intervening. In learning, the present powers of the pupil are
the initial stage; the aim of the teacher represents the remote limit.
Between the two lie means—that is middle conditions:—acts to
be performed; difficulties to be overcome; appliances to be used. Only
through them, in the literal time sense, will the initial activities
reach a satisfactory consummation.
These intermediate conditions are of interest precisely because the
development of existing activities into the foreseen and desired end
depends upon them. To be means for the achieving of present tendencies,
to be "between" the agent and his end, to be of interest, are different
names for the same thing. When material has to be made interesting, it
signifies that as presented, it lacks connection with purposes and
present power: or that if the connection be there, it is not perceived.
To make it interesting by leading one to realize the connection that
exists is simply good sense; to make it interesting by extraneous and
artificial inducements deserves all the bad names which have been
applied to the doctrine of interest in education.
So much for the meaning of the term interest. Now for that of
discipline. Where an activity takes time, where many means and
obstacles lie between its initiation and completion, deliberation and
persistence are required. It is obvious that a very large part of the
everyday meaning of will is precisely the deliberate or conscious
disposition to persist and endure in a planned course of action in spite
of difficulties and contrary solicitations. A man of strong will, in
the popular usage of the words, is a man who is neither fickle nor
half-hearted in achieving chosen ends. His ability is executive; that
is, he persistently and energetically strives to execute or carry out
his aims. A weak will is unstable as water.
Clearly there are two factors in will. One has to do with the foresight
of results, the other with the depth of hold the foreseen outcome has
upon the person. (i) Obstinacy is persistence but it is not strength of
volition. Obstinacy may be mere animal inertia and insensitiveness. A
man keeps on doing a thing just because he has got started, not because
of any clearly thought-out purpose. In fact, the obstinate man
generally declines ( although he may not be quite aware of his refusal)
to make clear to himself what his proposed end is; he has a feeling that
if he allowed himself to get a clear and full idea of it, it might not
be worth while.
Stubbornness shows itself even more in reluctance to criticize ends
which present themselves than it does in persistence and energy in use
of means to achieve the end. The really executive man is a man who
ponders his ends, who makes his ideas of the results of his actions as
clear and full as possible. The people we called weak-willed or
self-indulgent always deceive themselves as to the consequences of their
acts. They pick out some feature which is agreeable and neglect all
attendant circumstances. When they begin to act, the disagreeable
results they ignored begin to show themselves. They are discouraged, or
complain of being thwarted in their good purpose by a hard fate, and
shift to some other line of action. That the primary difference between
strong and feeble volition is intellectual, consisting in the degree of
persistent firmness and fullness with which consequences are thought
out, cannot be over-emphasized.
(ii) There is, of course, such a thing as a speculative tracing out of
results. Ends are then foreseen, but they do not lay deep hold of a
person. They are something to look at and for curiosity to play with
rather than something to achieve. There is no such thing as
over-intellectuality, but there is such a thing as a one-sided
intellectuality. A person "takes it out" as we say in considering the
consequences of proposed lines of action. A certain flabbiness of fiber
prevents the contemplated object from gripping him and engaging him in
action. And most persons are naturally diverted from a proposed course
of action by unusual, unforeseen obstacles, or by presentation of
inducements to an action that is directly more agreeable.
A person who is trained to consider his actions, to undertake them
deliberately, is in so far forth disciplined. Add to this ability a
power to endure in an intelligently chosen course in face of
distraction, confusion, and difficulty, and you have the essence of
discipline. Discipline means power at command; mastery of the resources
available for carrying through the action undertaken. To know what one
is to do and to move to do it promptly and by use of the requisite means
is to be disciplined, whether we are thinking of an army or a mind.
Discipline is positive. To cow the spirit, to subdue inclination, to
compel obedience, to mortify the flesh, to make a subordinate perform an
uncongenial task—these things are or are not disciplinary
according as they do or do not tend to the development of power to
recognize what one is about and to persistence in accomplishment.
It is hardly necessary to press the point that interest and discipline
are connected, not opposed. (i) Even the more purely intellectual phase
of trained power—apprehension of what one is doing as exhibited in
consequences—is not possible without interest. Deliberation will
be perfunctory and superficial where there is no interest. Parents and
teachers often complain—and correctly—that children "do not
want to hear, or want to understand." Their minds are not upon the
subject precisely because it does not touch them; it does not enter into
their concerns. This is a state of things that needs to be remedied,
but the remedy is not in the use of methods which increase indifference
and aversion. Even punishing a child for inattention is one way of
trying to make him realize that the matter is not a thing of complete
unconcern; it is one way of arousing "interest," or bringing about a
sense of connection. In the long run, its value is measured by whether
it supplies a mere physical excitation to act in the way desired by the
adult or whether it leads the child "to think"—that is, to reflect
upon his acts and impregnate them with aims. (ii) That interest is
requisite for executive persistence is even more obvious. Employers do
not advertise for workmen who are not interested in what they are doing.
If one were engaging a lawyer or a doctor, it would never occur to one
to reason that the person engaged would stick to his work more
conscientiously if it was so uncongenial to him that he did it merely
from a sense of obligation. Interest measures—or rather
is—the depth of the grip which the foreseen end has upon one m
moving one to act for its realization.
2. The Importance of the Idea of Interest in Education.
—Interest represents the moving force of objects—whether
perceived or presented in imagination—in any experience having a
purpose. In the concrete, the value of recognizing the dynamic place of
interest in an educative development is that it leads to considering
individual children in their specific capabilities, needs, and
preferences. One who recognizes the importance of interest will not
assume that all minds work in the same way because they happen to have
the same teacher and textbook. Attitudes and methods of approach and
response vary with the specific appeal the same material makes, this
appeal itself varying with difference of natural aptitude, of past
experience, of plan of life, and so on. But the facts of interest also
supply considerations of general value to the philosophy of education.
Rightly understood, they put us on our guard against certain conceptions
of mind and of subject matter which have had great vogue in philosophic
thought in the past, and which exercise a serious hampering influence
upon the conduct of instruction and discipline. Too frequently mind is
set over the world of things and facts to be known; it is regarded as
something existing in isolation, with mental states and operations that
exist independently. Knowledge is then regarded as an external
application of purely mental existences to the things to be known, or
else as a result of the impressions which this outside subject matter
makes on mind, or as a combination of the two. Subject matter is then
regarded as something complete in itself; it is just something to be
learned or known, either by the voluntary application of mind to it or
through the impressions it makes on mind.
The facts of interest show that these conceptions are mythical. Mind
appears in experience as ability to respond to present stimuli on the
basis of anticipation of future possible consequences, and with a view
to controlling the kind of consequences that are to take place. The
things, the subject matter known, consist of whatever is recognized as
having a bearing upon the anticipated course of events, whether
assisting or retarding it. These statements are too formal to be very
intelligible. An illustration may clear up their significance.
You are engaged in a certain occupation, say writing with a typewriter.
If you are an expert, your formed habits take care of the physical
movements and leave your thoughts free to consider your topic. Suppose,
however, you are not skilled, or that, even if you are, the machine does
not work well. You then have to use intelligence. You do not wish to
strike the keys at random and let the consequences be what they may; you
wish to record certain words in a given order so as to make sense. You
attend to the keys, to what you have written, to your movements, to the
ribbon or the mechanism of the machine. Your attention is not
distributed indifferently and miscellaneously to any and every detail.
It is centered upon whatever has a bearing upon the effective pursuit of
your occupation. Your look is ahead, and you are concerned to note the
existing facts because and in so far as they are factors in the
achievement of the result intended. You have to find out what your
resources are, what conditions are at command, and what the difficulties
and obstacles are. This foresight and this survey with reference to
what is foreseen constitute mind. Action that does not involve such a
forecast of results and such an examination of means and hindrances is
either a matter of habit or else it is blind. In neither case is it
intelligent. To be vague and uncertain as to what is intended and
careless in observation of conditions of its realization is to be, in
that degree, stupid or partially intelligent.
If we recur to the case where mind is not concerned with the physical
manipulation of the instruments but with what one intends to write, the
case is the same. There is an activity in process; one is taken up with
the development of a theme. Unless one writes as a phonograph talks,
this means intelligence; namely, alertness in foreseeing the various
conclusions to which present data and considerations are tending,
together with continually renewed observation and recollection to get
hold of the subject matter which bears upon the conclusions to be
reached. The whole attitude is one of concern with what is to be, and
with what is so far as the latter enters into the movement toward the
end. Leave out the direction which depends upon foresight of possible
future results, and there is no intelligence in present behavior. Let
there be imaginative forecast but no attention to the conditions upon
which its attainment depends, and there is self-deception or idle
dreaming—abortive intelligence.
If this illustration is typical, mind is not a name for something
complete by itself; it is a name for a course of action in so far as
that is intelligently directed; in so far, that is to say, as aims,
ends, enter into it, with selection of means to further the attainment
of aims. Intelligence is not a peculiar possession which a person owns;
but a person is intelligent in so far as the activities in which he
plays a part have the qualities mentioned. Nor are the activities in
which a person engages, whether intelligently or not, exclusive
properties of himself; they are something in which he engages and
partakes. Other things, the independent changes of other things and
persons, cooperate and hinder. The individual's act may be initial in a
course of events, but the outcome depends upon the interaction of his
response with energies supplied by other agencies. Conceive mind as
anything but one factor partaking along with others in the production of
consequences, and it becomes meaningless.
The problem of instruction is thus that of finding material which will
engage a person in specific activities having an aim or purpose of
moment or interest to him, and dealing with things not as gymnastic
appliances but as conditions for the attainment of ends. The remedy for
the evils attending the doctrine of formal discipline previously spoken
of, is not to be found by substituting a doctrine of specialized
disciplines, but by reforming the notion of mind and its training.
Discovery of typical modes of activity, whether play or useful
occupations, in which individuals are concerned, in whose outcome they
recognize they have something at stake, and which cannot be carried
through without reflection and use of judgment to select material of
observation and recollection, is the remedy. In short, the root of the
error long prevalent in the conception of training of mind consists in
leaving out of account movements of things to future results in which an
individual shares, and in the direction of which observation,
imagination, and memory are enlisted. It consists in regarding mind as
complete in itself, ready to be directly applied to a present material.
In historic practice the error has cut two ways. On one hand, it has
screened and protected traditional studies and methods of teaching from
intelligent criticism and needed revisions. To say that they are
"disciplinary" has safeguarded them from all inquiry. It has not been
enough to show that they were of no use in life or that they did not
really contribute to the cultivation of the self. That they were
"disciplinary" stifled every question, subdued every doubt, and removed
the subject from the realm of rational discussion. By its nature, the
allegation could not be checked up. Even when discipline did not accrue
as matter of fact, when the pupil even grew in laxity of application and
lost power of intelligent self-direction, the fault lay with him, not
with the study or the methods of teaching. His failure was but proof
that he needed more discipline, and thus afforded a reason for retaining
the old methods. The responsibility was transferred from the educator
to the pupil because the material did not have to meet specific tests;
it did not have to be shown that it fulfilled any particular need or
served any specific end. It was designed to discipline in general, and
if it failed, it was because the individual was unwilling to be
disciplined.
In the other direction, the tendency was towards a negative conception
of discipline, instead of an identification of it with growth in
constructive power of achievement. As we have already seen, will means
an attitude toward the future, toward the production of possible
consequences, an attitude involving effort to foresee clearly and
comprehensively the probable results of ways of acting, and an active
identification with some anticipated consequences. Identification of
will, or effort, with mere strain, results when a mind is set up,
endowed with powers that are only to be applied to existing material. A
person just either will or will not apply himself to the matter in hand.
The more indifferent the subject matter, the less concern it has for the
habits and preferences of the individual, the more demand there is for
an effort to bring the mind to bear upon it—and hence the more
discipline of will. To attend to material because there is something to
be done in which the person is concerned is not disciplinary in this
view; not even if it results in a desirable increase of constructive
power. Application just for the sake of application, for the sake of
training, is alone disciplinary. This is more likely to occur if the
subject matter presented is uncongenial, for then there is no motive (so
it is supposed) except the acknowledgment of duty or the value of
discipline. The logical result is expressed with literal truth in the
words of an American humorist: "It makes no difference what you teach a
boy so long as he doesn't like it."
The counterpart of the isolation of mind from activities dealing with
objects to accomplish ends is isolation of the subject matter to be
learned. In the traditional schemes of education, subject matter means
so much material to be studied. Various branches of study represent so
many independent branches, each having its principles of arrangement
complete within itself. History is one such group of facts; algebra
another; geography another, and so on till we have run through the
entire curriculum. Having a ready-made existence on their own account,
their relation to mind is exhausted in what they furnish it to acquire.
This idea corresponds to the conventional practice in which the program
of school work, for the day, month, and successive years, consists of
"studies" all marked off from one another, and each supposed to be
complete by itself—for educational purposes at least.
Later on a chapter is devoted to the special consideration of the
meaning of the subject matter of instruction. At this point, we need
only to say that, in contrast with the traditional theory, anything
which intelligence studies represents things in the part which they play
in the carrying forward of active lines of interest. Just as one
"studies" his typewriter as part of the operation of putting it to use
to effect results, so with any fact or truth. It becomes an object of
study—that is, of inquiry and reflection—when it figures as
a factor to be reckoned with in the completion of a course of events in
which one is engaged and by whose outcome one is affected. Numbers are
not objects of study just because they are numbers already constituting
a branch of learning called mathematics, but because they represent
qualities and relations of the world in which our action goes on,
because they are factors upon which the accomplishment of our purposes
depends. Stated thus broadly, the formula may appear abstract.
Translated into details, it means that the act of learning or studying
is artificial and ineffective in the degree in which pupils are merely
presented with a lesson to be learned. Study is effectual in the degree
in which the pupil realizes the place of the numerical truth he is
dealing with in carrying to fruition activities in which he is
concerned. This connection of an object and a topic with the promotion
of an activity having a purpose is the first and the last word of a
genuine theory of interest in education.
3. Some Social Aspects of the Question.
—While the theoretical errors of which we have been speaking have
their expressions in the conduct of schools, they are themselves the
outcome of conditions of social life. A change confined to the
theoretical conviction of educators will not remove the difficulties,
though it should render more effective efforts to modify social
conditions. Men's fundamental attitudes toward the world are fixed by
the scope and qualities of the activities in which they partake. The
ideal of interest is exemplified in the artistic attitude.
Art is neither merely internal nor merely external; merely mental nor
merely physical. Like every mode of action, it brings about changes in
the world. The changes made by some actions (those which by contrast
may be called mechanical) are external; they are shifting things about.
No ideal reward, no enrichment of emotion and intellect, accompanies
them. Others contribute to the maintenance of life, and to its external
adornment and display. Many of our existing social activities,
industrial and political, fall in these two classes. Neither the people
who engage in them, nor those who are directly affected by them, are
capable of full and free interest in their work. Because of the lack of
any purpose in the work for the one doing it, or because of the
restricted character of its aim, intelligence is not adequately engaged.
The same conditions force many people back upon themselves. They take
refuge in an inner play of sentiment and fancies. They are aæsthetic
but not artistic, since their feelings and ideas are turned upon
themselves, instead of being methods in acts which modify conditions.
Their mental life is sentimental; an enjoyment of an inner landscape.
Even the pursuit of science may become an asylum of refuge from the hard
conditions of life—not a temporary retreat for the sake of
recuperation and clarification in future dealings with the world. The
very word art may become associated not with specific transformation of
things, making them more significant for mind, but with stimulations of
eccentric fancy and with emotional indulgences. The separation and
mutual contempt of the "practical" man and the man of theory or culture,
the divorce of fine and industrial arts, are indications of this
situation. Thus interest and mind are either narrowed, or else made
perverse. Compare what was said in an earlier chapter about the
one-sided meanings which have come to attach to the ideas of efficiency
and of culture.
This state of affairs must exist so far as society is organized on a
basis of division between laboring classes and leisure classes. The
intelligence of those who do things becomes hard in the unremitting
struggle with things; that of those freed from the discipline of
occupation becomes luxurious and effeminate. Moreover, the majority of
human beings still lack economic freedom. Their pursuits are fixed by
accident and necessity of circumstance; they are not the normal
expression of their own powers interacting with the needs and resources
of the environment. Our economic conditions still relegate many men to
a servile status. As a consequence, the intelligence of those in
control of the practical situation is not liberal. Instead of playing
freely upon the subjugation of the world for human ends, it is devoted
to the manipulation of other men for ends that are non-human in so far
as they are exclusive.
This state of affairs explains many things in our historic educational
traditions. It throws light upon the clash of aims manifested in
different portions of the school system; the narrowly utilitarian
character of most elementary education, and the narrowly disciplinary or
cultural character of most higher education. It accounts for the
tendency to isolate intellectual matters till knowledge is scholastic,
academic, and professionally technical, and for the widespread
conviction that liberal education is opposed to the requirements of an
education which shall count in the vocations of life.
But it also helps define the peculiar problem of present education. The
school cannot immediately escape from the ideals set by prior social
conditions. But it should contribute through the type of intellectual
and emotional disposition which it forms to the improvement of those
conditions. And just here the true conceptions of interest and
discipline are full of significance. Persons whose interests have been
enlarged and intelligence trained by dealing with things and facts in
active occupations having a purpose (whether in play or work) will be
those most likely to escape the alternatives of an academic and aloof
knowledge and a hard, narrow, and merely "practical" practice. To
organize education so that natural active tendencies shall be fully
enlisted in doing something, while seeing to it that the doing requires
observation, the acquisition of information, and the use of a
constructive imagination, is what most needs to be done to improve
social conditions. To oscillate between drill exercises that strive to
attain efficiency in outward doing without the use of intelligence, and
an accumulation of knowledge that is supposed to be an ultimate end in
itself, means that education accepts the present social conditions as
final, and thereby takes upon itself the responsibility for perpetuating
them. A reorganization of education so that learning takes place in
connection with the intelligent carrying forward of purposeful
activities is a slow work. It can only be accomplished piecemeal, a
step at a time. But this is not a reason for nominally accepting one
educational philosophy and accommodating ourselves in practice to
another. It is a challenge to undertake the task of reorganization
courageously and to keep at it persistently.
Summary.
Interest and discipline are correlative aspects of activity having an
aim. Interest means that one is identified with the objects which
define the activity and which furnish the means and obstacles to its
realization. Any activity with an aim implies a distinction between an
earlier incomplete phase and later completing phase; it implies also
intermediate steps. To have an interest is to take things as entering
into such a continuously developing situation, instead of taking them in
isolation. The time difference between the given incomplete state of
affairs and the desired fulfillment exacts effort in transformation, it
demands continuity of attention and endurance. This attitude is what is
practically meant by will. Discipline or development of power of
continuous attention is its fruit.
The significance of this doctrine for the theory of education is
twofold. On the one hand it protects us from the notion that mind and
mental states are something complete in themselves, which then happen to
be applied to some ready-made objects and topics so that knowledge
results. It shows that mind and intelligent or purposeful engagement in
a course of action into which things enter are identical. Hence to
develop and train mind is to provide an environment which induces such
activity. On the other side, it protects us from the notion that
subject matter on its side is something isolated and independent. It
shows that subject matter of learning is identical with all the objects,
ideas, and principles which enter as resources or obstacles into the
continuous intentional pursuit of a course of action. The developing
course of action, whose end and conditions are perceived, is the unity
which holds together what are often divided into an independent mind on
one side and an independent world of objects and facts on the other.
