John Dewey

“ EFFORT, THINKING, AND MOTIVATION
What is it that we really prize under the name of effort? What is it that we are really trying to secure when we regard increase in ability to put forth effort as an aim of education? Taken practically, there is no great difficulty in answering. What we are after is persistency, consecutiveness, of activity: endurance against obstacles and through hindrances. Effort regarded as mere increase of strain in the expenditure of energy is not in itself a thing we esteem. ”

“ Strange as it may seem to say it, one of the chief objections both to mechanical drill work and to the assigning of subject-matter too difficult for pupils is that the only activity to which they actually incite the pupils is in lines too easy for them. Only the powers already formed, the habits already fixed, are called into play; the mind—the power of thinking—is not called into action. Hence apathy in children naturally sluggish, or mind-wandering in children of a more imaginative nature. What happens when work too difficult, work beyond the limits of capacity, is insisted upon? ”

“ The musical score and the technique of fingering, in which the child finds no interest when it is presented as an end in itself, when it is isolated, becomes fascinating when the child realizes its place and bearings in helping him give better and fuller utterance to his love of song. Whether it appeals or fails to appeal is a question of relationship. While the little child takes only a near view of things, as he grows in experience he becomes capable of extending his range, and seeing an act, or a thing, or a fact not by itself, but as part of a larger whole. ”

“ While we are congratulating ourselves upon the well-disciplined habits which the pupil is acquiring (judged by his ability to reproduce a lesson when called upon) we forget to commiserate ourselves because his deeper nature has secured no discipline at all, but has been left to follow its own caprices and the disordered suggestions of the moment. I do not see how anyone can deny that the training of habits of imagination and lines of emotional indulgence is at least equally important with the development of certain outward habits of action. ”

“ We should find this division of attention and the resulting disintegration so great that we might cease teaching in sheer disgust. None the less, it is well for us to recognize that this state of things exists, and that it is the inevitable outcome of those conditions which exact the simulation of attention without securing its essence.
The principle of "making" objects and ideas interesting implies the same divorce between object and self. When things have to be made interesting, it is because interest itself is wanting. ”

“ The major difficulty with our schools is that they have not adequately enlisted the interests and energies of children in school work. Good teaching, the teaching of the future, will make school life vital to youth. In so doing it will not lose sight of the demands and needs of an adult society; it will serve them better in that it will have a fuller coöperation of the children.
A single illustration will suffice to show how completely we may fall short of realizing public purposes in education if we fail to center our attention on the fundamental function and nature of the learning process. ”

“ Interest is not some one thing; it is a name for the fact that a course of action, an occupation, or pursuit absorbs the powers of an individual in a thoroughgoing way. But an activity cannot go on in a void. It requires material, subject-matter, conditions upon which to operate. On the other hand, it requires certain tendencies, habits, powers on the part of the self. Wherever there is genuine interest, there is an identification of these two things. The person acting finds his own well-being bound up with the development of an object to its own issue. ”

“ Not to introduce an element of work in this sense when the child is ready for it is simply arbitrarily to arrest his development, and to force his activities to a level of sense-excitation after he is prepared to act upon the basis of an idea. A mode of activity that was quite normal in its own period becomes disintegrating when persisted in after a person is ripe for an activity involving more thought. ”

“ Anything indifferent or repellent becomes of interest when seen as a means to an end already commanding attention; or seen as an end that will allow means already under control to secure further movement and outlet. But, in normal growth the interest in means is not externally tied on to the interest in an end; it suffuses, saturates, and thus transforms it. It interprets or revalues it—gives it a new significance. The man who has a wife and family has thereby a new motive for his daily work—he sees a new meaning in it, and takes into it a steadiness and enthusiasm previously lacking. ”

“ If the external conditions are such that the child cannot put his activity into the work to be done, he learns, in a most miraculous way, the exact amount of attention that has to be given to this external material to satisfy the requirements of the teacher, while saving up the rest of his powers for following out lines of suggestion that appeal to him. I do not say that there is absolutely no moral training involved in forming these habits of external attention, but I say that there is also a question of moral import as to the formation of habits of intellectual dissipation. ”

“ The question of pleasure is a question of the immediate or momentary reaction. Happiness differs in quality from both a pleasure and a series of pleasures. Children are almost always happy, joyous—and so are grown people—when engaged consecutively in any unconstrained mode of activity—when they are occupied, busy. The emotional accompaniment of the progressive growth of a course of action, a continual movement of expansion and of achievement, is happiness;—mental content or peace, which when emphatic, is called joy, delight. ”

“ In the ball game, the interest may intensify with every passing stage of the game; the last inning finally settles who wins and who loses, a matter which up to that time has been in suspense or doubt. In the game, the last stage is not only the last in time, but also settles the character of the entire game, and so gives meaning to all that has preceded. ”

“ Somehow our teaching has not attracted children to the school and its work. Too many children leave school as soon as the law allows. Too many pupils, still within the compulsory attendance age, are retarded one, two, or more grades. Too many of the able and willing of mind are only half-engrossed with their school tasks. And of those who emerge from the schools, duly certified, too many are skillful merely in an outer show of information and manners which gives no surety that the major part of their inner impulses are capable of rational and easy self-direction. ”

“ On the other hand, meeting an obstacle may enhance a person's perception of an end; may make him realize more clearly than ever he did before how much it means to him; and accordingly may brace him, invigorate him in his effort to achieve the end. Within certain limits, resistance only arouses energy; it acts as a stimulus. Only a spoiled child or pampered adult is dismayed or discouraged and turned aside, instead of being aroused, by lions in the path—unless the lions are very fierce and threatening. ”

“ The giving up now involves an appeal to reason, and may be quite consistent with tenacity of purpose or "strength of will." However, reflection may take quite another course: it may lead not to reconsideration of ends, but to seeking for new means; in short, to discovery and invention also. The child who cannot carry the stone that he wishes may neither keep on in a fruitless struggle to achieve the impossible, nor yet surrender his purpose; he may be led to think of some other way of getting the stone into motion; he may try prying it along with a bar. "Necessity is the mother of invention." ”

“ He is as much absorbed in one as in the other. Any failure in this complete identification means an inartistic product, means that he is not really interested in his ideal. Upon the other hand, his interest is in the end regarded as an end of the particular processes which are its means. Interest attaches to it because of its place in the active process of what it is but the culmination. He may also regret the approach of the day that will put an end to such an interesting piece of work. At all events, it is not the mere external product that holds him. ”

“ Drudgery is an activity which in itself is quite disagreeable, performed under the constraint of some quite extraneous need. Play and work cannot, therefore, be distinguished from one another according to the presence or absence of direct interest in what is doing. A child engaged in making something with tools, say, a boat, may be just as immediately interested in what he is doing as if he were sailing the boat. ”

“ The demand is for a growing activity, an occupation, an interest. Given that, happiness will take care of itself.
There is no rigid, insurmountable line between direct and indirect interest. As an activity grows more complex, it involves more factors. A child who is simply building with blocks has an activity of very short time span; his end is just ahead of what he is doing at the moment—namely, to keep on building so that his pile grows higher—does not tumble down. It makes no difference to him just what he makes, as long as it stands up. ”

“ The wise parent tries to protect the child from mere strain; from the danger of excessive fatigue, of damaging the structures of the body, of getting bruises. Effort as mere strained activity is thus not what we prize. On the other hand, a judicious parent will not like to see a child too easily discouraged by meeting obstacles. If the child is physically healthy, surrender of a course of action, or diversion of energy to some easier line of action, is a bad symptom if it shows itself at the first sign of resistance. The demand for effort is a demand for continuity in the face of difficulties. ”

“ Good teaching, in other words, is teaching that appeals to established powers while it includes such new material as will demand their redirection for a new end, this redirection requiring thought—intelligent effort. In every case, the educational significance of effort, its value for an educative growth, resides in its connection with a stimulation of greater thoughtfulness, not in the greater strain it imposes. Educative effort is a sign of the transformation of a comparatively blind activity (whether impulsive or habitual) into a more consciously reflective one. ”

“ An interest is primarily a form of self-expressive activity—that is, of growth that comes through acting upon nascent tendencies. If we examine this activity on the side of what is done, we get its objective features, the ideas, objects, etc., to which the interest is attached, about which it clusters. If we take into account that it is self-development, that self finds itself in this content, we get its emotional or appreciative side. Any account of genuine interest must, therefore, grasp it as out-going activity holding within its grasp an object of direct value. ”

“ It is enough to note that the motive force of an end and the interest that the end possesses are equivalent expressions of the vitality and depth of a proposed course of activity.
A word of warning may be in place against taking the idea of motivation in too personal a sense, in a sense too detached, that is, from the object or end in view. In the theory of instruction, as distinct from its practice, the need of motivation was for a long time overlooked or even denied. It was assumed that sheer force of will, arbitrary effort, was alone required. ”

“ As a matter of fact, the doctrine of discipline has not succeeded. It is absurd to suppose that a child gets more intellectual or mental discipline when he goes at a matter unwillingly than when he goes at it out of the fullness of his heart. The theory of effort simply says that unwilling attention (doing something disagreeable because it is disagreeable) should take precedence over spontaneous attention. ”

“ All interest is naturally in objects that carry an activity forward or in objects that mark its fulfillment; hence the character of the interest depends upon the nature of these objects. If they are low, or unworthy, or purely selfish, then so is the interest, but not otherwise. The strength of the interest in other persons and in their activities and aims is a natural resource for making activities broad, generous, and enlightened in scope; while the physical, manual, and scientific interests in their identification with objects make for a broadening of the self. ”

“ But if we start from the standpoint of the active powers of the children concerned, we shall measure the utility of new subject-matter and new modes of skill by the way in which they promote the growth of these powers. We shall not insist upon tangible material products, nor upon what is learned being put to further use at once in some visible way, nor even demand evidence that the children have become morally improved in some respect: save as the growth of powers is itself a moral gain. ”

“ But in civilized society, eating is not merely a means to getting so much food-power into the system; it is a social process, a time of family and friendly reunion; moreover, each course of the meal has its own enjoyment just as a matter of partaking of food, that is, of an active continuing process. Division into means and end hardly has any meaning. Each stage of the entire process has its own adequate significance or interest ”

“ Yet, a guarantee of school attendance will never of itself fulfill the purposes of state education. The parent and the attendance officer, reinforced by the police power of the state, can guarantee only one thing,—the physical presence of the child at school. It is left to the teacher to insure his mental attendance by a sound appeal to his active interests. A child's character, knowledge, and skill are not reconstructed by sitting in a room where events happen. ”

“ Adults are so accustomed to making a sharp distinction between their relations to things and to other persons; their pursuits in life are so largely specialized along the line of having to do with things just as things, that it is difficult for them, practically impossible, to realize the extent to which children are concerned with things only as they enter into and affect the concerns of persons, and the extent to which a personal-social interest radiates upon objects and gives them their meaning and worth. ”

“ Only with children having specialized intellectual abilities is it possible to secure mental activity without participation of the organs of sense and the muscles. Yet how much of elementary schooling has consisted in the imposition of forms of discipline intended to repress all activity of the body! Under such a régime it is not surprising that children are found to be naturally averse to learning, or that intellectual activity is found to be so foreign to their nature that they have to be coerced or cunningly coaxed to engage in it! ”

“ When an activity is too easy and simple, a person either engages in it because of the immediate pleasurable excitement it awakens, or he puts just enough of his powers upon it—their purely mechanical and physical side—to perform what is required in a perfunctory way, while he lets his mind wander to other things where there is at least enough novelty to keep his fancies going. ”

“ The emotion of effort, or of stress, is a warning to think, to consider, to reflect, to inquire, to look into the matter. Is the end worth while under the circumstances? Is there not some other course which, under the circumstances, is better? So far as this reconsideration takes place, the situation is quite different from that of a person merely giving up as soon as an obstacle shows itself. ”