The Training of the Mind - Educational Psychology : Part 6

The Story of the Mind
by James Mark Baldwin

(Page 13 of 17)

With this general line of treatment in mind, the details of which the reader will work out in the light of the boy's type, space allows me only two more points before I pass to the sensory scholar.

First, in all the teaching of the type of mind now in question, pursue a method which proceeds from the particular to the general. The discussion of pedagogical method with all its ins and outs needs to take cognizance of the differences of students in their type. The motor student should never, in normal cases, be given a general formula and told to work out particular instances; that is too much his tendency already - to approach facts from the point of view of their resemblances. What he needs rather is a sense of the dignity of the single fact, and of the necessity of giving it its separate place, before hastening on to lose it in the flow of a general statement.

So whether the teacher have in hand mathematics, grammar, or science, let him disclose the principles only gradually, and always only so far as they are justified by the observations which the boy has been led to make for himself. For the reason that such a method is practically impossible in the descriptive sciences, and some other branches, as taught in the schoolbooks - botany, zoology, and, worse than all, history and geography - we should restrict their part in the discipline studies of such a youth. They require simple memory, without observation, and put a premium on hasty and temporary acquisition.

As I have said, algebra should be subordinated to geometry. Algebra has as its distinctive method the principle of substitution, whereby symbols of equal and, for the most part, absolute generality are substituted for one another, and the results stand for one fact as well as for another, in disregard of the worth of the particular in the scheme of nature. For the same reason, deductive logic is not a good discipline for these students; empirical psychology, or political economy, is a better introduction to the moral sciences for them when they reach the high school. This explains what was meant above in the remark as to the method of teaching grammar. As to language study generally, I think the value of it, at this period, and later, is extraordinarily overrated.

The proportion of time given to language study in our secondary schools is nothing short of a public crime in its effect upon students of this type - and indeed of any type. This, however, is a matter to which we return below. The average student comes to college with his sense of exploration, his inductive capacity, stifled at its birth. He stands appalled when confronted with the unassimilated details of any science which does not give him a "key" in the shape of general formulas made up beforehand. Were it not that his enlarging experience of life is all the while running counter to the trend of his so-called education, he would probably graduate ready for the social position in which authority takes the place of evidence, and imitation is the method of life.

Second, the teacher should be on the lookout for a tendency which is very characteristic of a student of this type, the tendency, to fall into elaborate guessing at results. Take a little child of about seven or eight years of age, especially one who has the marks of motor heredity, and observe the method of his acquisition of new words in reading. First he spokes the word which his habit dictates, and, that being wrong, he rolls his eyes away from the text and makes a guess of the first word that comes into his mind; this he keeps up as long as the teacher persists in asking him to try again. Here is the same tendency that carries him later on in his education to a general conclusion by a short cut. He has not learned to interpret the data of a deliberate judgment, and his attention does not dwell on the necessary details. So with him all through his training; he is always ready with a guess. Here, again, the teacher can do him good only by patiently employing the inductive method. Lead him back to the simplest elements of the problem in hand, and help him gradually to build up a result step by step.

I think in this, as in most of the work with these scholars, the association with children of the opposite type is one of the best correctives, provided the companionship is not made altogether one-sided by the motor boy's perpetual monopolizing of all the avenues of personal expression. When he fails in the class, the kind of social lesson which is valuable may be taught him by submitting the same question to a pupil of the plodding, deliberate kind, and waiting for the latter to work it out. Of course, if the teacher have any supervision over the playground, similar treatment can be employed there.

Coming to consider the so-called "sensory" youth of the age between eight, let us say, and sixteen - the age during which the training of the secondary school presents its great problems - we find certain interesting contrasts between this type and that already characterized as "motor." The study of this type of youth is the more pressing for reasons which I have already hinted in considering the same type in the earlier childhood period. It is necessary, first, to endeavor to get a fairly adequate view of the psychological characteristics of this sort of pupil.

The current psychological doctrine of mental "types" rests upon a great mass of facts, drawn in the first instance from the different kinds of mental trouble, especially those which involve derangements of speech - the different kinds of Aphasia. The broadest generalization which is reached from these facts is that which marks the distinction, of which I have already said so much, between the motor and the sensory types. But besides this general distinction there are many finer ones; and in considering the persons of the sensory type, it is necessary to inquire into these finer distinctions.

Not only do men and children differ in the matter of the sort of mental material which they find requisite, as to whether it is pictures of movements on the one hand, or pictures from the special senses on the other hand; but they differ also in the latter case with respect to which of the special senses it is, in this case or that, which gives the particular individual his necessary cue, and his most perfect function. So we find inside of the general group called "sensory" several relatively distinct cases, all of which the teacher is likely to come across in varying numbers in a class of pupils. Of these the "visual" and the "auditory" are most important.

There are certain aspects of the case which are so common to all the cases of sensory minds, whether they be visual, auditory, or other, that I may set them out before proceeding further.

Copyright 1902 by D. Appleton and Company.

About the Author

James Mark Baldwin (1861-1934) was an American philosopher and psychologist who was educated at Princeton under the supervision of Scottish philosopher James McCosh. He made important contributions to early psychology, psychiatry, and to the theory of evolution.