Talks to Teachers on Psychology

and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals

by

William James

eBooks@Adelaide
2009

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Table of Contents

Preface.

Talks to Teachers on Psychology

  1. Psychology and the Teaching Art
    The American educational organization,— What teachers may expect from psychology,— Teaching methods must agree with psychology, but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom,— The science of teaching and the science of war,— The educational uses of psychology defined,— The teacher’s duty toward child-study.
  2. The Stream of Consciousness
    Our mental life is a succession of conscious ‘fields,’— They have a focus and a margin,— This description contrasted with the theory of ‘ideas,’— Wundt’s conclusions, note.
  3. The Child as a Behaving Organism
    Mind as pure reason and mind as practical guide,— The latter view the more fashionable one today,— It will be adopted in this work,— Why so?— The teacher’s function is to train pupils to behavior.
  4. Education and Behavior
    Education defined,— Conduct is always its outcome,— Different national ideals: Germany and England.
  5. The Necessity of Reactions
    No impression without expression,— Verbal reproduction,— Manual training,— Pupils should know their ‘marks’.
  6. Native Reactions and Acquired Reactions
    The acquired reactions must be preceded by native ones,— Illustration: teaching child to ask instead of snatching,— Man has more instincts than other mammals.
  7. What the Native Reactions are
    Fear and love,— Curiosity,— Imitation,— Emulation,— Forbidden by Rousseau,— His error,— Ambition, pugnacity, and pride. Soft pedagogics and the fighting impulse,— Ownership,— Its educational uses,— Constructiveness,— Manual teaching,— Transitoriness in instincts,— Their order of succession.
  8. The Laws of Habit
    Good and bad habits,— Habit due to plasticity of organic tissues,— The aim of education is to make useful habits automatic,— Maxims relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative,— 2. No exception,— 3. Seize first opportunity to act,— 4. Don’t preach,— Darwin and poetry: without exercise our capacities decay,— The habit of mental and muscular relaxation,— Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort trained,— Sudden conversions compatible with laws of habit,— Momentous influence of habits on character.
  9. The Association of Ideas
    A case of habit,— The two laws, contiguity and similarity,— The teacher has to build up useful systems of association,— Habitual associations determine character,— Indeterminateness of our trains of association,— We can trace them backward, but not foretell them,— Interest deflects,— Prepotent parts of the field,— In teaching, multiply cues.
  10. Interest
    The child’s native interests,— How uninteresting things acquire an interest,— Rules for the teacher,—‘Preparation’ of the mind for the lesson: the pupil must have something to attend with,— All later interests are borrowed from original ones.
  11. Attention
    Interest and attention are two aspects of one fact,— Voluntary attention comes in beats,— Genius and attention,— The subject must change to win attention,— Mechanical aids,— The physiological process,— The new in the old is what excites interest,— Interest and effort are compatible,— Mind-wandering,— Not fatal to mental efficiency.
  12. Memory
    Due to association,— No recall without a cue,— Memory is due to brain-plasticity,— Native retentiveness,— Number of associations may practically be its equivalent,— Retentiveness is a fixed property of the individual,— Memory versus memories,— Scientific system as help to memory,— Technical memories,— Cramming,— Elementary memory unimprovable,— Utility of verbal memorizing,— Measurements of immediate memory,— They throw little light,— Passion is the important factor in human efficiency,— Eye-memory, ear-memory, etc.,— The rate of forgetting, Ebbinghaus’s results,— Influence of the unreproducible,— To remember, one must think and connect.
  13. The Acquisition of Ideas
    Education gives a stock of conceptions,— The order of their acquisition,— Value of verbal material,— Abstractions of different orders: when are they assimilable,— False conceptions of children.
  14. Apperception
    Often a mystifying idea,— The process defined,— The law of economy,— Old-fogyism,— How many types of apperception?— New heads of classification must continually be invented,— Alteration of the apperceiving mass,— Class names are what we work by,— Few new fundamental conceptions acquired after twenty-five.
  15. The Will
    The word defined,— All consciousness tends to action,— Ideo-motor action,— Inhibition,— The process of deliberation,— Why so few of our ideas result in acts,— The associationist account of the will,— A balance of impulses and inhibitions,— The over-impulsive and the over-obstructed type,— The perfect type,— The balky will,— What character building consists in,— Right action depends on right apperception of the case,— Effort of will is effort of attention: the drunkard’s dilemma,— Vital importance of voluntary attention,— Its amount may be indeterminate,— Affirmation of free-will,— Two types of inhibition,— Spinoza on inhibition by a higher good,— Conclusion.

Talks to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals

  1. The Gospel of Relaxation
  2. On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
  3. What Makes a Life Significant?
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