UNINTERESTING AND INTERESTING WORK. 149 Connect Uninteresting Work with Interesting. Sometimes also pupils are inattentive because the facts of the subject have no natural interest for them, and have never been connected with anything that is interesting. No observer of children has failed to notice that things devoid of interest may become interesting by being connected with something that is interesting. Revolution in Primary Teaching. The revolution that is taking place in the primary teaching of this country is based at the outset on this fact. When children start to school, they are already interested in nature in the bugs, butterflies, grasshoppers, birds, trees, plants and flowers with which they are familiar. They are also interested in such stories as come within the range of their comprehension — stories about animals, fairy stories, stories of adventure and the like. The business of the primary teacher is to work these interests for all they are worth to gradually develop the interest in nature into an interest in science, and the interest in stories into an interest in literature and history, and also to connect these interests with the other work of the school in such a way that it may be done in the most economic manner possible. To this end, the reading, writing, spelling, drawing, number and language work should be connected with the study of nature and stories to as large an extent as possible. Reading for the sake of pronouncing words is a stupid task - suitable only to a parrot. But reading for the sake of acquiring information about something the pupil is already interested in is a delightful labor. Writing for the sake of imitating a copy is uninteresting. But writing for the sake of giving expression to interesting thoughts is a pleasure. What child of seven or eight cares what six times twenty-two make? But when he and five companions each sees twentytwo red-winged grasshoppers on a given excursion, the question as to how many they have all seen is an entirely different one. What child cares to draw a mere figure, or some object taken to the school just for the sake of being drawn? But what child does not take an interest in drawing if he is asked to put on paper his ideas of a certain scene, or to represent, as he sees it, an object he is already interested in? These illustrations might be continued indefinitely. But they will serve their purpose if they show how the interest of interesting work may be carried over to uninteresting work, and how all the work of the school may in this way be made interesting. It ought to be noted also that such work deepens the interest in, and the value of, the work that is already interesting. A child who draws a scene as it is in his mind, or an object as he sees it, cares more about the scene and the object than he did before he drew them. When he has read a story about an animal he is interested in, he is more interested in it than he was before. When he has used numbers to learn how many objects of a certain class he has seen, or what proportion one class forms to another class, the greater definiteness of his ideas is a source of pleasure. By connecting, then, the interesting work of the school with that which would otherwise be uninteresting, the uninteresting work not only becomes interesting-it adds to the value, and intensifies the interest, of the work that is already interesting. Individuality of Pupils and Inattention. Sometimes also boys are inattentive because we do not respect their individuality because we set them to doing entirely uncongenial work. It is very instructive to learn that Darwin was counted a very dull boy, and I think it quite likely that the same opinion was held of Edison. The trouble, of course, was not with Darwin, but with his teachers. He had a strong bent towards the study of nature, and they wanted to teach him Latin and Greek, and make him memorize books about nature. If his teachers had practiced Pestalozzi's injunction, this dull boy might have been transformed into the most interesting and interested student in their schools.1 QUESTIONS ON THE TEXT. 1. Under what circumstances is it proper to ask your pupils questions that you do not answer? 2. Mention various ways in which you can use a library to deepen the interest of your pupils. 3. In what ways does a system of discipline aid you in developing your pupils' powers of attention? 4. By what principle should the arrangement of a programme of studies be determined? 5. Mention various causes of inattention and lack of interest, and state what can be done to remove them. 6. What is meant by "respecting the individuality" of the pupil? SUGGESTIVE QUESTIONS. 1. State the various uses of questioning pupils. 2. If a boy liked arithmetic, and disliked geography, or conversely, how would you try to develop an interest in the subject to which he was indifferent? 3. Do you think there should be elective studies in high schools, and, if so, to what extent? 4. Can you respect the individuality of students who are studying the same subjects? 5. What is meant by "correlation "? 1 See Appendix A. "Concentration "? LESSON XVII. KNOWING, FEELING, AND WILLING. IN studying our experience in order to ascertain the nature and laws of attention, we have already observed three fundamentally different classes of mental facts. We have seen that what we perceive, remember, recollect, and believe as the result of reasoning - depends on what we attend to. But all these acts of mind (perception, memory, recollection, and reasoning) are alike forms of knowledge. - Two Kinds of Knowledge. — Perception gives us what seems to be immediate or direct knowledge of external objects trees, houses, fences, and the like; memory, direct knowledge of past objects and events; reasoning, mediate or indirect knowledge of objects and events and laws - past, present, and future. They differ, then, in the kinds of facts of which they tell us, and the way in which they tell us about them. Perception tells us of the present directly; memory, of the past directly; reasoning, of past, present, and future indirectly. But they agree in being forms or kinds of knowledge. What we perceive, and what we remember, and what we learn by reasoning, we alike know, provided there has been no mistake in the processes. KNOWLEDGE AND FEELING. 153 But we Relation between Knowledge and Feeling. have seen that what we perceive, remember, etc., depends on what interests us-on what gives us pleasure and pain. This interest this pleasure and pain-is a fundamentally different fact from knowledge. Acts of knowing are indeed usually accompanied by pleasure or pain; but the knowing is one thing, the pleasure or pain quite another. We shall see this clearly if we consider the effect the knowledge of the same fact produces on different minds, or the same mind under different circumstances. One man reads an account of a death; it produces no effect, because the dead man was an entire stranger. Another reads it and is prostrated with grief; the dead man was his son. Or you drop your purse, and you see it lying on the ground, as you stoop to pick it up, with no feeling either of pleasure or pain. But if you see it after you have lost it and have hunted for it a long time in vain, you have a pronounced feeling of pleasure. - Different Forms of Feeling. All forms of pleasure and pain are called feelings. Between the pleasure which comes from eating a peach and that which results from solving a difficult problem, or learning good news of a friend, or thinking of the progress of civilization-between the pain that results from a cut in the hand and that which results from the failure of a long-cherished plan or the death of a friend — there is a long distance. But the one group are all pleasures; the other, all pains. And whatever the source of the pleasure or pain, it is alike feeling. Willing Discriminated from Knowing and Feeling. — We saw, also, in studying attention, that it often requires |