William Henry Pyle

“ Imitation is of importance not only in acquiring the actions of life but also in getting our ideals. Habits of thinking are no less an aspect of our lives than are habits of acting. Our attitudes, our prejudices, our beliefs, our moral, religious, and political ideals are in large measure copied from people about us. The family and social atmosphere in which one lives is a mold in which one’s mind is formed and shaped. ”

“ The notion of causality puts new meaning into our view of the training of a child. The doctrine of development puts new meaning into our notion of the nature of a child. We can understand man only when we view him genetically, that is, in the light of his origin. We can understand a child only in the light of what his ancestors have been. ”

“ What is the relation of memory to thinking and the other mental functions? One often hears a teacher say that she does not wish her pupils to depend on memory, but wishes them to reason things out. Such a statement shows a misunderstanding of the facts; for reasoning itself is only the recall of ideas in accordance with the laws of association. Without memory, there would be no reasoning, for the very material of thought is found to be the revived experiences which we call ideas, memories. ”

“ What will one not do to the hated one? The child who does not love his teacher gets little good from school while under that teacher. Moreover, school work is often a failure because it is so unreal, has so little relation to an actual world, and seems foreign to any real needs of the child. No one is going to work very hard unless the work is prompted by desire. Our desires come from our needs. Therefore, if we are to enlist the child’s feelings in the service of his education, we must make the school work vital and relate it, if possible, to the actual needs of the child. ”

“ The child lives in the present, in a world of perceptions. A man is not so much tied down to the present; he lives in memory and anticipation. He thinks more than does the child. A man is content to sit down in his chair and think for hours at a time, a child is not. This thinking is the passing of ideas, now one, then another and another. These ideas are the survivals or revivals of our past experience. The order of their coming depends on our past experience. ”

“ But after these years of practice, one can play a piece of music at sight; that is, the first stimulus sets off perfectly a very complicated response. This sort of performance is one of the highest feats of skill that man accomplishes.
To get skill, then, one must practice. But mere repetition is not sufficient. For practice to be most effective, one must put his whole mind on what he is doing. If he divides his attention between the acts which he is practicing and something else, the effect of the practice in fixing and perfecting the habit is slight. ”

“ If we stick a pin into a leg of a man, we get a characteristic response. The man moves, he cries out. This shows two very great differences between a man and a table. The man is sensitive and has the power of action, the power of moving himself. The table is not sensitive, nor can it move itself. If the pin is thrust into one’s own leg, one has pain. Human beings, then, are sensitive, conscious, acting beings. And the study of sensitivity, action, and consciousness is the field of psychology. These three characteristics are not peculiar to man. ”

“ No one ever amounts to anything till he can hold himself to a task, to a fixed purpose. One must learn to form plans extending over weeks, months, and years, and to hold unflinchingly to them, just as one must hold himself to his study table and allow nothing to distract or to interfere. No training a child can receive is more important than this, for it gives him control over his life, it gives him control over the ideas that are to become focal and determine action. It is for this reason that we call such training a training of attention. ”

“ Our feelings and emotions are the fountains from which nearly all our volitional actions flow. Feeling is the mainspring of life. Nearly everything we do is prompted by love, or hate, or fear, or jealousy, or rivalry, or anger, or grief. If the feelings have such close relation to action, then the schools must take them into account, for by education we seek to control action. If the feelings control action, then we must try to control the feelings. We must get the child into a right state of mind toward the school, toward his teacher, and toward his work. ”

“ Just as in habit-formation we should by exercise and practice acquire those kinds of skill that will serve us best in the future, so in getting knowledge we should by repetition strengthen the connections between those ideas that we shall need to have connected in the future. All education looks forward and is preparatory. As a result of training in the organization of ideas, a pupil can learn how to organize his experience, in a measure, independent of the teacher. He learns to know, himself, what ideas are significant, and what connections of ideas will be most helpful. ”

“ A very little investigation reveals likenesses between parent and offspring which we may not have expected before.
However, if we start out to hunt for facts of heredity, we shall perhaps be as much impressed by differences between parent and child as we shall by the resemblances. In the first place, every child has two parents, and it is often impossible to resemble both. One cannot, for example, be both short and tall; one cannot be both fair and dark; one cannot be both slender and heavy; one cannot have both brown eyes and blue. ”

“ We can only indicate here that the business of the school is not merely to teach people how to make a living, but to teach them how to enjoy the living. There are many avenues from which we get the higher forms of pleasure. There are really many different worlds which we may experience: the world of animals, the world of plants, the mechanical world, the chemical world, the world of literature and of art, the world of music. It is the duty of the schools to open up these worlds to the children, and make them so many possibilities of joy and happiness. ”

“ If he successfully performs an act when he sees it done by another, the act must be one which he already knows how to perform, and for whose performance the idea has already served as a stimulus. Now if imitation were instinctive in the strict sense, one could perform the act for the first time merely from seeing another do it, without any previous experience or learning. It is doubtful whether there are any such inherited connections. It is, however, true that human beings are of such a nature that, particularly in early life, they like to do and want to do what they see others doing. ”

“ Human psychology is the science of human nature. But human nature has many aspects. To some extent, our bodies are the subject matter for physiology, anatomy, zoölogy, physics, and chemistry. Our bodies may be studied in the same way that a rock or a table might be studied. But a human being presents certain problems that a rock or table does not present. If we consider the differences between a human being and a table, we shall see at once the special field of psychology. If we stick a pin into a leg of the table, we get no response. ”

“ One of the first requisites of good thinking is a reliable memory. One must have facts to reason, and these facts must come to one in memory to be available for thought. If one wishes to become a great thinker in a certain field, he must gain experience in that field and organize that experience in such a way as to remember it and to recall it when it is wanted.
What one does deplore is memory for the mere words with no understanding of the meaning. In geometry, for example, a student sometimes commits to memory the words of a demonstration, with no understanding of the meaning. ”

“ Thinking is talking to oneself. One cannot talk without language.
The importance that attaches to language can hardly be overestimated. When the child acquires the use of language, he has acquired the use of a tool, the importance of which to thinking is greater than that of any other tool. Now, one can think without language, in the sense that memory images come and go,—we have defined thinking as the flow of imagery, the passing or succession of ideas. But after we have named things, thinking, particularly reasoning, becomes largely verbal, or as we said above, talking to oneself. ”

“ Ideas and perceptions related to one’s chosen work go at once and readily to the focus of consciousness; other things escape notice.
It is for this reason that we become “crankier” every year that we live. We are attending to only one aspect of the world. While this blinds us to other aspects of the world, it brings mastery in our individual fields. We can, then, by training and practice, get a general control over attention, and by working in a certain field or kind of work, we make it easy to attend to things in that field or work. ”

“ The child must like the school, like the teacher, and want to learn.
Moreover, we must create the right state of mind in connection with each study, each task. The child must come to feel the need and importance of each individual task as well as of each subject. The task is then desirable, it is to be sought for and worked at, it is important for life.
This is merely enlisting the child’s nature in the interest of his education. For motive, we must always look to the child’s nature. The two great forces which pull and drive are pleasure and pain. Nature has no other methods. ”

“ We have briefly indicated the possibilities of psychology in the various occupations and professions. There is a further application that has no reference to the practical needs of life, but to enjoyment. A psychological knowledge of human nature adds a new interest to all our social experience. The ability to understand the actions and feelings of men puts new meaning into the world. The ability to understand oneself, to analyze one’s actions, motives, feelings, and thoughts, makes life more worth living. ”

“ Reasoning is a form of thinking. Reasoning, too, is a flow of ideas. But while reasoning is thinking, it is a special form of thinking; it is thinking to a purpose. In thinking as above described and illustrated, no immediate ends of the person are served; while in reasoning some end is always sought. In reasoning, the flow of ideas must reach some particular idea that will serve the need of the moment, the need of the problem at hand. Reasoning, then, is controlled thinking, thinking centering about a problem, about a situation that one must meet. ”

“ This is not saying that there is no existence of spirit apart from body, but that at present such existence is beyond the realm of science.
The dependence of mind upon body in a general way is evident to every one, upon the most general observation and thought. We know the effect on the mind of disease, of good health, of hunger, of fatigue, of overwork, of severe bodily injury, of blindness or deafness. We have, perhaps, seen some one struck upon the head by a club, or run over by an automobile, and have noted the tremendous consequences to the person’s mind. ”

“ Girls excel boys in practically all the aspects of memory.
In rote memory, that is, memory for lists of unrelated words, there is not much difference; but the girls are somewhat better. However, in the ability to remember the ideas of a story, girls excel boys at every age. This superiority of girls over boys is not merely a matter of memory. A girl is superior to a boy of the same age in nearly every way. This is merely a fact of development. A girl develops faster than a boy, she reaches maturity more quickly, in mind as well as in body. ”

“ We, therefore, have the term social heredity, meaning the taking on of all sorts of social habits and ideals through imitation.
The part that imitation plays in the education of a child may be learned by going to a country home and noting how the boy learns to do all the many things about the farm by imitating his father, and how the girl learns to do all the housework by imitating her mother. Imitation is the basis of much of the play of children, in that their play consists in large part of doing what they see older people doing. ”

“ It might perhaps better be called a training of the will. But the will is only the attentive consciousness. The idea that is clear, that holds its own in consciousness, is the idea that produces action. When we say that we will to do a certain thing, all we can mean is that the idea of this act is clearest and holds its focal place in consciousness to the exclusion of other ideas. ”

“ The public schools ought to be on the watch for genius in any and all kinds of work. When a genius is found, proper training ought to be provided to develop this genius for the good of society as well as for the good of the individual himself. A few children show ability in drawing and painting, others in music, others in mechanical invention, some in literary construction. When it is found that this ability is undoubtedly a native gift and not a passing whim, special opportunity should be provided for its development and training. ”

“ By primary, sensory experience is meant our immediate, direct knowledge of any aspect of the world. In this field of our conscious life, we are entirely dependent upon sense organs and nerves and brain. Injuries to the eyes destroying their power to perform their ordinary work, or injuries to the optic nerve or to the visual center in the brain, make it impossible for us to see.
These facts are so self-evident that it seems useless to state them. One has but to hold his hands before his eyes to convince himself that the mind sees by means of eyes, which are physical sense organs. ”

“ Parents must help the children to keep their purposes before them. Children forget, even when they wish to remember. Often, they do not want to remember. The parents’ duty is to get the child to want to remember, and to help him to remember, whether he wants to or not. One of the main differences between childhood and maturity is that the child lives in the present, his purposes are all immediate ones. Habits always look forward, they are for future good and use. Mature people have learned to look forward and to plan for the future. They must, therefore, perform this function for the children. ”

“ We are awkward, making many unnecessary movements, and the work is tiresome and fatiguing. After long practice, the speed with which we can manipulate the keys in playing the piano is wonderful. Our playing becomes accurate, perfect. We do it with ease, with no unnecessary movements. We can play the piano, after we become skilled, without paying attention to the actual movements of our hands. We can play the piano while concentrating upon the meaning of the music, or while carrying on a conversation, or while thinking about something else. As a rule, pleasure and confidence come with skill. ”

“ Nailing shingles on a roof illustrates well the various aspects of habituation. The expert carpenter not only nails on many more shingles in a day than does the amateur, but he does it better and with more ease, and with much less fatigue. The carpenter knows exactly how much he can do in a day, and each particular movement is certain and sure. The carpenter has confidence in, and usually prides himself on, this ability, thus getting pleasure out of his work.
The operations in arithmetic illustrate most of the results of habituation. Practice in addition makes for speed and accuracy. ”

“ So in any branch of study, the person who can acquire the facts in less time than another person, has the extra time for learning something else or for going over the same material and organizing it better. The scientist who remembers all the significant facts that he reads, and sees their bearing on his problems, has a great advantage over the person who does not remember so well.
Of course, there are certain dangers in having a good memory, just as there is danger in being brilliant generally. The quick learner is in danger of forming slovenly habits. ”

“ The tendency to imitate others coupled with the desire to be thought well of by others is one of the most powerful factors in producing conformity. They are the whips which keep us within the bounds of custom and conventionality. The tendency to imitate is so strong that its results are almost as certain as are those of inherited tendencies. It is almost as certain that a child will be like his parents in speech, manners, customs, superstitions, etc., as it is that he will be like them in form of body. He not only walks and talks and acts like his parents, but he thinks as they do. ”

“ If one will take a walk with a child, one can observe the operation of the collecting tendency, particularly if the walk is in the fields and woods. The child will be observed to take leaves, flowers, fruits, seeds, nuts, pebbles, and in fact everything that is loose or can be gotten loose. They are taken at first aimlessly, merely because they attract attention. The original, natural response of the child toward that which attracts attention is usually to get it, get possession of it and take it along. It is easy to see why such tendencies were developed in man. ”

“ Owing to the importance which psychology has in the science of education, it will be well for us to make some inquiry into the nature of education. If the growth, development, and learning of children are all controlled and determined by definite causal factors, then a systematic statement of all these factors would constitute the science of education. In order to see clearly whether there is such a science, or whether there can be, let us inquire more definitely as to the kind of problems a science of education would be expected to solve. ”

“ A knowledge of human nature can be of much service to society in the prevention of crime. This will come about from a better knowledge of the psychological principles of habit-formation and moral training, through a better knowledge of how to control human nature. A large percentage of all crime, perhaps as much as forty per cent, is committed by feeble-minded people. Now, if we can detect these people early, and give them the simple manual education which they are capable of receiving, we can keep them out of a life of crime. ”

“ It must be clear now, that human action, human behavior, is the main field of psychology. For, even though our main interests in people were in their minds, we could learn of the minds only through the actions. But our interests in other human beings are not in their minds but in what they do. ”

“ It is possible to build up ideas, ideals, and habits. And ideas, ideals, and habits constitute the man. Training is possible only because a child is a being that can be influenced. What any child will be when grown depends upon what kind of child it was at the beginning and upon the influences that affect it during its early life while it is growing into maturity. We need have no doubt about the outcome of any particular child if we know, with some degree of completeness, the two sets of factors that determine his life—his inheritance and the forces that affect this inheritance. ”