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10. What are some of the ways used by teachers in robbing children of their tasks and the glory of victory?

REFERENCES

BURNHAM, W. H., The Normal Mind: An Introduction to Mental Hygiene and to the Hygiene of School Instruction (New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1924).

GROVES, Ernest R., Personality and Social Adjustment (New York, Longmans, Green & Co., 1923).

HEALY, William, Mental Conflicts and Misconduct (Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1917).

The Individual Delinquent (Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1915).

MATEER, Florence, The Unstable Child (New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1924).

MORGAN, J. B., The Psychology of the Unadjusted School Child (New York, Macmillan Co., 1924).

THOMAS, W. I., The Unadjusted Girl (Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1923).

WALLIN, J. E. W., Education of Handicapped Children (Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1924).

WELLS, F. L., Mental Adjustments (New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1917).

WHITE, William A., The Mental Hygiene of Childhood (Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1919).

-, Principles of Mental Hygiene (New York, Macmillan Co., 1924).

CHAPTER XXIII

INTERPRETATIONS IN PSYCHOLOGY

Students of psychology and educational psychology are usually indoctrinated with some particular brand of the science. The different points of view set forth in this chapter will provoke some reflective thinking. They are not included for the purpose of being accepted or rejected. With an open mind as free from bias as possible, they should be weighed and considered for what they are worth. Watson and McDougall (1,2), although extremists in their positions, afford us a contrast worth serious thought. Prince finds behaviorism in serious error (5); and attempts a reconciliation of the two opposing theories with his theory of identification. Consciousness is thus identified with the inner reality of neural activity. Reflexes and body processes are the mode, and consciousness the reality.

The selection from Bentley (6) is fairly representative of the thinking of the personalistic psychologists. Calkins' "The Religious Consciousness" (7) is another example of similar reasoning.

The selections from Koffka (8) and Ogden (9) contain some of the fundamental theses of the Configuration or Gestalt School. These psychologists are particularly interested in applying the concepts of the Gestalt theory to an interpretation of the mental life of children. They wish to get away from the old machine concepts that pervade much of the contemporary psychology which interprets mental life in terms of stimulus and response. They would interpret it more in terms of configuration. The educational implications are well indicated in the lengthy extract from Prof. R. M. Ogden's Contribution of Gestalt Psychology to Education (9).

Münsterberg's statement of casual and purposive psychology attempts to show the necessity for both interpretations

(10).

That causality is not easily determined is clearly shown by Robinson (12).

1. Behavior Is Purposive

We have in the selections from Professor McDougall, the noted psychologist at Harvard and successor to Münsterberg and James, quite a contrast to the program offered us by Dr. Watson. According to some critics, purposive striving is a philosophical rather than a psychological concept. Morton Prince attempts a reconciliation of the purposive and mechanistic concepts, represented by McDougall and Watson respectively, through identification of the inner reality of neural processes with consciousness. Prince asserts that consciousness is the reality and neural processes the mode by which this reality is apprehended by a second organism. Thus will and purpose if objectively apprehended through the senses, would necessarily be apprehended as mechanistic in terms of reflexes. The Gestalt psychologists would choose the (psycho) vitalistic explanation in preference to the mechanistic if the choice lay between the two, if only to avoid the alternative of maintaining an entirely false attitude towards life. The choice is not forced upon them, they maintain. They reason thus: if nervous processes correspond to such phenomena as rhythm, melody, and figure-and the pathological cases, in which injury to the brain renders the creation of such phenomena difficult or even impossible, teaching us that nervous processes must have a share in occasioning them-then these same nervous processes must embrace all the essential characteristics of the phenomena in question.

2. Purposive Striving

[MCDOUGALL, William, "Striving as a Fundamental Category of Psychology," Scientific Monthly, 1924, Vol. 19, pp. 305–312.]

On the one hand there is a group of psychologists, who, actuated by the desire to mark off an exclusive field of study as their province, define psychology as the science of consciousness and would confine themselves to the analytic description of conscious states as complex conjunctions of elements or units

of some kind. On the other hand are those who, feeling that such analytic description, whether it resolves consciousness into a complex of sensations or atoms of consciousness, or into larger more complex units (the so-called configurations or Gestalten), brings but little light on human nature and conduct, and can hardly claim to be in itself a science, are driven to the opposite extreme; they ignore this realm of facts, alleged to be the peculiar and distinctive field of psychology, and they would bring to the study of man only those methods of observation, description and explanation which are used in the physical sciences. These two tendencies, which when they are carried to extremes, result respectively in what is unfortunately called "structural psychology" and in "behaviorism," although so different in their outcome, are but two expressions of one desire, the desire to make psychology conform to some preconceived notion of what a science is or should be. . . .

...

I desire to urge that the most fundamental need of psychology, the first demand to be met by the policy of boldness, is the adoption without reserve of the conception of purposive striving as valid, useful, nay indispensable and therefore true.

The life of man from birth to death is one long series of purposive strivings. Sometimes, as when he plans his career and sets out to build up a home and a family, his goal is remote and somewhat vague, defined in his mind in general terms only; sometimes it is precisely and exactly defined, as when he goes to eat his favorite dinner at his favorite table in his club; sometimes it is near and yet but vaguely defined, as when . . . during an absorbing after-dinner conversation, he reaches out to put a piece of candy in his mouth. There is a vast range of differences in respect of the nearness or remoteness of the goal; and in respect also of the clearness, fullness, and adequacy with which he thinks of his goal. And there is also a wide range of differences between his successive strivings in a third respect, namely, in respect of the urgency, the intensity, the concentration and output of energy manifested in his striving at any moment. Yet, in spite of these wide differences, the striv ing is always one aspect of his waking life. And even in his dreams, as we now realize, thanks to Professor Freud, the striving goes on, bringing what strange and partial satisfactions it may to the buried, thwarted and denied tendencies of his nature. From top to bottom of this scale of strivings we have to do with the same fundamental phenomenon. In the instances near the

top, the more developed modes of mental life, involving the solving of a defined problem, the thinking out of a plan, we all recognize the purposive nature of the striving. The goal, as envisaged, governs the movements of both mind and body.

In instances at the lower end of the scale, introspection or rather retrospection, inevitably fails to seize and report the thinking of the goal as distinct from the perceiving of the situation of the moment. Yet the continuity of the series justifies us in regarding its lower members as fundamentally of the same nature as its upper members and in applying the term "purposive" to them all alike.

Even in laboratory experiment, where the conditions are commonly so set as to reduce the striving factor to a dead level of uniformity and monotony, it refuses to be ignored forever; and so, after a generation of experimentation that ignored it, it is rediscovered and reinstalled in its place of fundamental importance, disguised under some such terminology as "determining tendency" or "motor set" or "conditioned reflex" or "prepotent reflex" or what not.

Under all three of the types of psychology we have noticed, this most vital, essential, distinctive aspect of human life escapes the psychologist. For it cannot be described as either a sensation or a configuration (Gestalt). And it is not to be discerned by an inspection of the detailed movements of the limbs or of other bodily organs, no matter how exact.

Nor can it be restored or recovered in the psychology of parallel columns. It can be discerned in others only by sympathetic observation and interpretation of the course of their lives. If, under the influence of any metaphysical dogma or any supposed rule of method, you overlook it from the start, you cannot introduce it into your otherwise completed picture of human nature, as an element to be added to and put alongside others already described.

It is too all-pervasive for such treatment. As well might the landscape artist, after painting a picture without atmosphere, attempt to add it by drawing a smear of paint across the whole. This is the difficulty found by students who have been brought up on the parallel-column psychology. . . .

...

Can we accept any account, any description or explanation of human life which leaves out of the picture this all-important aspect that we call impulse, desire, striving, towards a goal?

When we turn to the fields of applied psychology, the same truth stares us in the face. In every field we find that the most

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