The Mind as Misrepresented to Teachers

I

IT is well that education should be eyed with suspicion, as it has been from of old. ‘Be not many of you teachers,’ says an ancient letter, ‘knowing that ye shall receive heavier judgment.’ And to-day we should have an open ear for the latest messenger who runs in breathless to tell us of teachers’ evil ways. Yet occasionally we may hold and cross-question the tidings-bearer, lest from a false report we should act hastily, only to make bad worse.

Such caution is perhaps needed with those who now come in the name of psychology, saying that, since mental discipline, which clings to a few central studies to develop the mind, has no scientific standing whatever, the school should, with whole heart, work to a different end, teaching only those studies that inform, that give useful knowledge. We may find that the one side no less than the other speaks unreliably for the vital young science whose name is so freely taken. But first let us hale the witnesses into court.

The child’s mind, according to one account, is a group of wide powers, or faculties, — of observation, for example, and memory, attention, imagination, reason, — which the teacher, by suited exercises, must make strong and supple. These great powers, once they become vigorous and elastic, stand ready throughout life for all important needs. Time is well given to their development, even by studies that in themselves will never be of use. The particulars needed for one’s work are too many to be foreseen, and, with a prepared mind, may easily be learned when the need is clearer. Powers have been given new life, not only for buying and selling and medicine and law, but for still wider service in regions where the day’s work will never lead.

Those who so believe, their opponents say, are suckled in a creed outworn. Science has destroyed the simple faith. Experiments by James, Thorndike, Woodworth, and others have shown how idle is the attempt to train these general powers, have shown indeed that there are no general powers to train. The belief in such powers goes with the antiquated idea of mental faculties now of historic interest only, and swept aside with phrenology and its absurd map of the skull and brain.

Having destroyed in this way the faith in general powers and their training, what is offered in its place? A belief in particulars, and in particulars only. Instead of a single power of memory, there is a power to recall colors, another power to recall sounds, and so on — we know not how far. The mind is our convenient name for countless special operations or functions. We may train one of these functions or a number of them, but not a function in general — attention in general, or imagination in general, or reason. Further, these countless particular functions are independent; and when you have trained one of them, you have trained that limited function and none else. What you do to the mind by way of education knows its place; it never spreads. You train what you train.

The educational corollary of these things is momentous. We must discover the specific reaction, the specific information, which the child will use in after life, and make sure that he possesses these and only these. The teacher’s direction of attention here veers from east to west. The centre of interest is no longer the child’s mind, but the particular things in life that have to be done. Of a study, we are to ask, ‘Does it contribute to the doing of these things?’ rather than, ‘Does the study make the child’s mind more alert or sound or sane?’ Instead of giving form to the mind, we are to give it information. Instead of moulding the mind, we are to fill the mind. Where the education whose aim was mental discipline might have as its symbol a stripped athlete busied with Indian clubs and chest-weights for strength and agility, the education that opposes mental discipline and calls for mental contents might have as its symbol some receptacle that is being filled — a jar, with oil or wine; or a tool-chest, with screw-driver, chisel, and plane.

The controversy is thus in brief before us, each side with its different description of the mind. ‘Believe the psychologist,’ is the cry of a recent writer to schoolmen; and this must be my excuse for offering objection to both accounts, and in their place a picture of the mind different from either, and, I believe, with a far richer promise of education.

II

The mind is surely ill described by most believers in mental discipline. In so far as our remembering is explained by a faculty of memory, and our reasoning by a faculty of reason, we are offered mere words in the place of causes. But, along with explanations that do not explain, are clear errors. The mind is divided into great powers, — like sight, hearing, memory, imagination, reason, — each of which is supposed to be almost simple and uniform throughout. And this we now know is false.

Moreover, the believers in mental discipline too often fix their interest: upon the powers by which we know, our intellectual faculties, and treat like a step-mother those great powers by which we take delight, and are moved to passion, and make resolve, and act. A certain strength and deftness of bare intellect is overvalued, to the misprising of the deep inner forces that drive and direct the intellect, as well as of something more nearly external—the definite and detailed knowledge of the objects with which intelligence must deal.

The defects of this account of mind are thus greater than many even of its critics seem to know. But some of the defects are caught and well denounced by those who hold the mind but as a receptacle to be given ‘contents.’ They rightly see the mind helpless even were it deft and strong; they see its lack of actual knowledge. They see also that the mind is of immeasurably more varied powers than are nominated in the short list of faculties in which the old schoolmaster was taught to believe.

But with these rugged virtues why not take the whole doctrine of ‘contents’ to our hearts?

First, and perhaps least important, its watchword confirms the ignorant in their ignorance. We are only too ready to regard the child’s mind as a vessel into which knowledge is to be poured, and the new doctrine should appear to give to this crude notion a kind of scientific seal. So far as the child’s training is viewed as mental contents, the mind itself is viewed as a receptacle, a container. And a container is both inert and indifferent: a jug idly accepts anything; a tool-chest takes no active part to receive its tools. Merely glance at the metaphor, and its absurdity is revealed. Those who believe in mental contents would cry out with one voice that they did not mean that.

For, if there is anything upon which psychologists are agreed, it is that the mind is active; not indifferent, but selective, forever choosing and rejecting. Even its humblest experiences, the colors and sounds by which the world is known, are not given us, but are the mind’s unique and mysterious response to external stimulation. Hue and tone, the students of physics and of psychology are agreed, do not exist in the external world. They are our reaction; and with them we create for ourselves a strange counterpart of the reality without. And for one object awakening enough interest to be noticed, ten have vainly assailed our eyes and ears and have been ignored. These acts of notice and selection do not seem acts, being without effort, without strain of will. But action is not always marked by effort: a child at play is as active as a child at some deadening task.

If the things we see and hear hardly enter into the mind as into a passive receptacle, more clearly is this true of our recollections, our imaginings, our conclusions reasoned out. Unless we actively reconstruct the past and recognize it as past, we do not remember. The child can possess no imaginings or judgments save what he has himselt imagined or judged. Nor can he create them once, and forever after ‘contain’ them; each time that they are before him, they must be created afresh — on the instant, usually, and with no slightest hint that power has gone into their remaking. As well call the ever-new movements of some graceful dancer the ‘contents’ of her body, as use this name for the marvelous expressions of the mind.

And still more clearly is this dead image broken by the will. In his purpose the boy proclaims himself no mere recipient, but a doer; not clay, but the potter. He takes his place among the infant deities, imposing his ideas upon brute substance until in some measure it is made into the likeness of his mind.

But we waste time upon this unhappy watch-word of the party. Not until we find a jar that can change its form and enlarge, a tool-chest that helps to fashion and use the tools it holds, will this image do more than darken counsel.

III

Turning now from metaphor to plain statement, let us ask whether it be true that practice keeps its place, that you train only what you train.

The experiments in clear support of this doctrine are few; most experiments contradict it. Improvement in judging the area of certain figures, as was just said, fails to bring equal improvement in judging other figures. But the judgment of these other figures is not left untouched. On the contrary, it receives marked benefit. And while one experimenter found that neatness remained within narrow limits, another found that it could easily be made to pass such limits: if the children, in writing their arithmetic lesson, for example, were urged to neatness as of universal value, their papers in geography also were neater, although this other subject had not been named in the urging. Or, again, Swift practised with the right hand the tossing and catching of balls, keeping two in the air at once, until he had attained a high degree of skill. And now, was it with the right hand only that the effect of the practice appeared? No; it appeared also with the left; In some cases it was as if fully two thirds of the practice had in some way been transferred. And in many other directions of research, transfer of training is found.

It will hardly be possible to follow the attempted explanations of this spread; it can hardly be explained away. And even a spread of small amount may be important: the effort would be well repaid if practice in justness of conduct at school were to bring even the slightest increase in justice of conduct in all other relations of life.

The evidence from the laboratory thus shows that the mind is unlike land, where ploughing of a field does not affect the soil beyond the fence. But the evidence is not confined to the laboratory. It is known, for example, that a left-handed child trained to act as if he were right-handed may stutter, and, becoming embarrassed, may incline to remain alone. The repression thus may work disastrously even into distant regions of the mind. And we are only at the threshold of our knowledge of the brain. Indeed, it is impossible to say that a serious effect in one part of the brain-cortex ever leaves the rest of the cortex unchanged; the change may be greater here than there, but never circumscribed.

Instead, then, of proving that you train what you train, the psychological experiments which have so troubled the waters of education prove that normally you train what you don’t train.

And now, is it true, as the partisans of ‘contents’ maintain, that our mental powers are stubbornly particular, and never of general use? One would almost think, from some accounts, that a mental function could be trained for little more than one occasion, like the bow upon presentation at court. Yet even so particular a response as that of answering the telephone is run through and through with generality. There is never quite the same signal, never quite the same movements of the body, never the same words spoken, never in the same tone, never to the same purpose. If one cannot but see the breadth and openness in even so restricted a habit as this, how much more clearly general is the other habit of assuming a fighting attitude toward difficulties, of asking evidence for any universal assertion, of giving special heed to the side opposed to one’s private interest. These habits of mind, and a host like them, are perhaps less wide than the memory in general, or the reason in general of the older education. For us, the important thing is to see their immense range of use, in all manner of situations and by all manner of men, whether day-laborers or diplomatists.

So far we have been busied in denial, and denial by itself profits little: it should be the prelude to something more positive and gracious. Let us, then, look more directly upon the mind itself, to see, if possible, its more acceptable constitution, noticing our disputants only at limes and out of the corner of our attention. Their artificial divisions into faculty and function in time tone down to their true value; as in the picture of the dissected muscles of eye and cheek and forehead, which we have to correct, knowing that these ghastly members are in life fed with warm blood, clothed with soft skin, and controlled by affection and intelligence; and in their stead we have a human and expressive face.

The mind is capable of wide forms of action; if we pursue this idea we come upon pleasant scenes. We come upon Lincoln, with his habit of ‘bounding’ every important idea in his use, never at ease until he saw clearly what limited it on north, south, east, and west, with no borders lost in the mist. Such a habit is of use for any idea and for anybody. Because it is not the whole of reason, we must not be blind to the part it can play in reason, immensely wide, even universal, in its sweep.

Yet we must also see the need for special knowledge. If one is to think effectively of sugar-beets or air-plane engines, he must study such beets, such engines. But he will not think effectively upon these if he thinks of these alone: his interest and his knowledge must widen to the principles of agriculture or of aerodynamics; and, beyond, he will need botany, or physics, and chemistry. Chemistry, then, is important for a lad uncertain whether he will deal with beets or engines. But what of the boy or girl who does not know, and whom no one as yet can tell, whether beets, engines, taxation, tuberculosis, or the Gospel will lie at the centre of his thinking in the time to come? Must he give laborious years to all these and to a thousand things besides, that he may be ready for the day of action? Inevitable and enormous waste is in that direction. He had best be at home in the central studies into which all special subjects lead; and with these, and even more useful, he will need habits of intellectual economy, of accuracy in interpreting what is read and heard, of distinguishing important from unimportant, of throwing himself with vigor into the work in hand. These are a part of intellectual training; these and other things take the place of the two or three faculties of the older belief. They stand out as significant to an eye bewildered by the endless array of special functions that for some are the only things left. These wide and superior powers call for training, and the lad who has them trained has an incalculable advantage over every lad in whom they remain untrained.

But were we now to look to the energy of the mind, we should find something still wider than these, evident, not only in our thinking, but in every form of will. This energy makes itself known in the strength of the man’s attention, in the vigor of his intellectual attack, and out beyond intelligence, in his endurance, in the impact and tenacity of his purpose. Its amount is not the same as the amount available, which suffers changes not due merely to the ups and downs of health. Some crisis, as all know from The Energies of Men, may open a hidden reservoir from which power now flows into a man’s every act. In the war, men and women who had before been working to their utmost suddenly assumed duties that doubled or even trebled their task. No new function may have been called to life, but rather the longfamiliar acts felt an access of energy; and in this store of energy connected with all functions, whether they be special or general, we have an intimation of the mind as of another plan from what has too often been taught. It is not a mere composite of general faculties, or of particular functions; but something single, yet varied, holding together all functions and energizing them with a common life.

The release of pent-up energy lies close to the emotions; and in them we shall discover changes deep and wide — changes that reveal new possibilities of education.

For the fruit of every one of our intellectual powers is markedly affected by the emotions behind them and interfused with them. There is a whole group of passions which, in certain forms and intensities, are strength-giving — hope, for example, and gladness and anger and fear. To these we should doubtless look for the cause of that opening of the gate of energy in crises when energy is our sorest need. They make and unmake the man. They hold our powers together; they disorganize and disrupt. The war has brought new illustrations of this, when emotional stress and strain, without wounds, have caused the soldier to be blind or deaf, unable to speak even his own name — great stretches of his past a blank to him. A like influence of emotion upon the total organization of the mind has long been observed in hysteria, with its functional blindness and deafness, its functional paralyses, its disturbance of memory and of the very feeling of one’s identity. In all these cases something beneath the special functions has broken, and for the time their cunning is gone. Their life, then,is clearly notin themselves: in part, at least, it wells up from deeper sources.

The play of emotion thus reveals the mind. If its powers seem stubbornly specialized and separate and insulated, this is true only in part and on the surface. Deep within we find free intercourse, free circulation. For all its particularized abilities, then, the mind is whole and fluid. A passion acts in it like a drop of strong chemical that causes ebullition or precipitation throughout the whole. We cannot afford to neglect these universal potencies. The sect called Christian Scientists, with its eye upon some of these energizing emotions, shows that the neglect is being noticed and avenged. And the growing attention to play is something of a belated redress. We once thought that health and mental vigor needed mere muscular contractions — so many footpounds of exercise per diem. The spirit of play in the exercise is the secret elixir, and with it apparently the exercise can almost be spared. Some day we shall know how much the great and balanced workers owe to their power to play — in mind if not in body. Wilson, like Lincoln, enjoys the theatre; and humor is a grace of each. With a right grasp of the mind’s character the emotions will come into their own. Time and some impatience will bring us to share the conviction of the wise physician, Sir James Crichton-Browne, that in all education these need uncommon care; but that, even for special work in medicine, the right and sensitive emotions of the physician himself can alone give effect to his learning and his judgment and his skill of hand.

But the energies and the emotions are not the only regions neglected both by those who would give mental discipline and by those who would give mental contents. The instincts and the will cry out their own neglect. And this is the more important, for they too lead us beyond the thought of independent functions and faculties, until we see the mind’s worth as something decided largely by the quality of its organization; and see that this organization can be directed toward the better or the worse. The neglect and the opportunity here invite longer consideration.

All children, if we look closely at their conduct, show a number of inborn traits — among others, an interest in possessing things, an attachment to other persons, a desire to shine in one’s own and in others’ eyes, a curiosity, a driving toward contention and domineering. And according as these impulses are bound together in one or another way, there result persons who stand opposite one another like day and night.

In one kind of youth, these various impulses act almost in independence. In another, they are bound until either the life is almost crushed out of many of them, or t hey are all made slaves of one of their roughest number. In still a third, the impulses are strong and united, but in a freer way, keeping watch upon one another; no one of them can stir without ears pricked up in all the rest; and its behavior is subject to their urging and restraint. But our present youth is indeed a fortunate youth, for in him the sense of attachment to others, expanded and refined into obligation, speaks the last word to all the competing interests. The native impulses have been brought to their place and proportion, each active, each tempered by its neighbors, each contributing to the right expression of the whole, each trained, like the soldiers of the Tenth Legion, both to command and to obey. Such training is both private and social. The individual is enriched and also the community. For, in a man so trained, the instincts that either devastate or upbuild our common life, the instincts of pugnacity and of sex, have become, not enemies, but friends, of the general good.

Now the possibility and the need of this care and organization of vital instincts into a right form of will hardly appear in many a picture of the mind. Neither a group of independent faculties nor a group of independent, functions reveals this constitution and opportunity. The mental disciplinarian, all eyes upon observation, memory, and reasoning, would strike into the depths of intellect, but misses those still lower depths of the affection, the instincts, and the will. Advocates of contents declare that the mind needs no care for its form and organization: it needs only to be filled.

We might well regard the mind as inviting, and indeed requiring, not only particular training and useful information, but also a profound redirecting and strengthening of its inner order, not wholly unlike religious conversion. Such a change will usually not be sudden, or marked by emotional storm: but gradually and in calm there will come a new perception and a new attachment of the affections and a striving toward a new goal. Something like this is in Plato’s thought, that true education is that which leads us always to love what we ought to love and to hate what we ought to hate, from the beginning to the end.

Changes in the direction of the affections, even changes that seem instantaneous, are not confined to religion, but are general possibilities of our nature. The interest which in such cases turns the man around has, of course, not been created on the instant: it was active all the while, but subordinate; and the conversion is but the final stage of a long struggle within. A new ordering of old interests and impulses has at last come, and a new stability is the result — as with an iceberg that by long melting below the ocean’s surface must find a lost balance, and with a plunge shows a new side.

Such changes with most of us, when they occur, are less cataclysmic, although no less real and profound. They are invited in early childhood and in the years when school and college are working in us good or ill. No system of education can afford to miss them and the constitution of the mind which they imply. The mind, as we study it, begins to reveal an immensity and an inner life hardly dreamed of by many who repeat solemnly what they take to be the final word of science. Each man’s mind is as varied and deep and wide, in its own way, as is the physical world. Its soundings and its sweep will forever exceed description, yet we can already dimly discern some of the forces that bind and move and strain the whole — a view which does not contradict, but corrects, those who notice only what is local and who miss the infinite in the infinitesimal.

IV

But some, while admitting that the corrected account of the mind may interest those who happen to be interested in such things, will deny that it is important for education. We must forever go on storing the mind, exercising its separate functions or faculties, they will hold, not because this alone is good, but because it alone is possible. ‘How,’ they will ask, ‘can we unlock the child’s reservoir of energy?’ How can we make his emotions strength-givers indeed, and not his ruin? Is it possible to enter among his wild instincts, leaving them no longer to howl in anarchy or under despotism, but to be a commonwealth guided by the best?’

The task is indeed difficult, and demands the talent of creative artists. Not in one generation or in two will the means be discovered and brought to bear. But whatever comes of the best family life, or of fortunate friendships, or of great public opportunity and need — whatever comes to the mind’s benefit from these is clearly within the aim of a right education. Whatever can be wrought by happy environment can in some measure be wrought by the school, which, too, is an environment planned and chosen. The result may be of less amount than comes from beyond school, but it need have no different quality. And, most of all, where the world beyond school promises the child, not the best, but only the worst, family life, with no fortunate friendships, and only the bleak prospect of factory and mill and mine, then is the demand insistent that we neglect nothing that will even slightly remake the mind into what is right and whole. The shame would not be so great were we to recognize the demand and our own incompetence. There would be some honor in feeling the lack, in hearing the challenge to the search, in being restless until the great discovery.

Once recognize the demand, and the inventive will of man is indomitable. So in education we shall have faith in things to come; we shall welcome all manner of experimental schools, especially those that look steadily to true understanding and to the will and the affection; out of that are the issues of life. Effectively to love what ought to be loved, and to hate what ought to be hated, requires, not heart alone, but brain and hand and tongue.

When we are offered new lamps for old, we must test the new to see how much of the old Aladdin-magic they contain. Let us have the new with the least loss. The cry for special training is a cry for specialists; and desirable as they are, they will bear watching: for in choosing them the temptation will be to ask only what and how much they know. Moreover, with specialists it is touch and go with their pupils. In the great city schools there is little of the leisurely contact, little of the intimacy, without which the imparting of useful knowledge is as sounding brass. The archaic teacher, who taught the same children everything that lay between Shakespeare and the rings of Saturn, at least became acquainted with his pupils, and little in him escaped their ferret eyes. Upbuilding can come only from those who have it, and the demand for it must not weaken the demand for the expert in his field. An erect mind knowing the salient things will do more to quicken and give a right facing to other minds than will a dozen husks of humanity with the entire alphabet in capitals after their names.

Instead, then, of following wholeheartedly the new lights of education, whose gospel is that subjects are more important than minds, wo shall reaffirm the exact opposite, while yet opening the door to the useful. The child is bigger than anything he can carry to market. In him is a divinity ready for employment, but greater than any employment he will choose. In fitting him to his job, we must have a live child left. This means no slighting of details: his general powers must be brought down to particulars, and to particulars that are useful. If the child be more than his information, we shall not neglect his taste. He will be sensitive to beauty, but by some toughening of his fibre he will escape daintiness and a repugnance to what is wholesome and of the soil. He will know the way into the enchanted world of music and painting and literature, but with a strengthened grasp of common duty; he will not treat lightly what he owes to family and friends, and to plain men everywhere.

And he will have reverence. This great completion may not aid him as a producer of commodities; it may even hinder. But, as Dr. Cabot has reminded us that some of the greatest things of life are unhygienic, so we shall not forget that some are uneconomic. Man, as was said of old, is indeed the great amphibian. He suffocates if kept from the upper air. There must be intercourse with uses great and small, but also with that great world which passes judgment upon all use.

No symbol does justice to the mysterious relation between the mind and him who helps it to its power. The teacher is like a physician, assisting at the birth of the mind — the mind, which, before, exists all cramped, not breathing as yet. But he also feeds the mind, guides its first steps, gives it gymnastic, gives it toys and tools. He is the mind’s autocrat, but an autocrat who knows when revolution is due, and abdicates; so wise that he has provided against anarchy, has trained many for office, and trained others to recognize them; so that self-government moves quietly into the departed ruler’s place. No symbol is adequate; but should we not be shrewd bargainers if we exchanged both the image of the stripped athlete with Indian clubs, and the image of the tool-chest well stocked, for the figure of a city-state, with its inhabitants becoming trained to artisan tasks, trained to build and enjoy parks and museums, theatres and sanctuaries; trained also to enter and to respect the massive halls of justice and law-making and command? At home in all these broad spaces, he who is bringing into order the great city pauses here for a moment and encourages, passes on and sits down and patiently guides; and in the end, and with many helpers different from himself, and with a favoring fortune, the republic of the mind is established, and unfurls its splendid banner with festival and song.