CHAPTER XVI. THE PROPER AND IMPROPER USES OF INTEREST. SUGGESTED READINGS. RELATION OF INTEREST TO WILL. HERBART YEAR BOOK. Dewey. pp. 11-12. THE SCHOOL AND SOCIETY. Dewey. pp. 54. TEACHING OF BIBLE CLASSES. See. p. 34. MY PEDAGOGIC CREED. Dewey. p. 15. FOUNDATIONS OF EDUCATION. Moore. pp. 49-67. How the Interest of Children May be Secured. Professor Dewey of the University of Chicago and of Columbia, in his Herbart Year Book covers the Relation of Interest to Will. There is one pregnant sentence in the discussion which sums up the whole of practical pedagogy. The gist of his argument is "that genuine interest is the identification, through action, of the self with some object or idea, because of the necessity of that object or idea for the maintenance of selfexpression. When we recognize that there are certain powers within the child urgent for development, needing to be acted upon, in order to secure their own efficiency and discipline, we have a firm basis upon which to build." Expressed in plainer language, things do not have to be "made interesting," if we are teaching the proper subject in the proper way. As Dr. Dewey puts it, "Interest is no more passively waiting around to be excited from the outside than is impulse," or the child's native desires and tendencies. Interest is but the child's own native responsiveness to its own self-active impulses, urging on to their satisfaction. Interest is thus (a) active, or propulsive, the native impulses of the child pushing on to a discharge in one direction or another; (b) objective, that is, interest always attaches itself to some object or thing, whether material or mental; (c) emotional, that is, accompanied by feelings of its being "worth while," which is the reason why the child keeps on in cases of effort which at times may seem disagreeable. The Child's Interests are really but another name for his innate hereditary impulses, desires, emotions, instincts, of which we have treated before. Professor Dewey writes in MY PEDAGOGIC CREED: "Interests are the signs and symptoms of growing power. I believe that they represent dawning capacities. Accordingly the constant and careful observation of interests is of the utmost importance for the educator. These interests are to be observed as showing the state of development which the child has reached. They prophesy the state upon which he is about to enter. Only through the continual and sympathetic observation of childhood's interests can the adult enter into the child's life and see what it is ready for, and upon what material it could work most readily and fruitfully. "These interests are neither to be humored nor repressed. To repress interest is to substitute the adult for the child, and so to weaken intellectual curiosity and alertness, to suppress initiative, and to deaden interest. To humor the interests is to substitute the transient for the permanent. The interest is always the sign of some power below; the important thing is to discover this power. To humor the interest is to fail to penetrate below. the surface, and its sure result is to substitute caprice and whim for genuine interest." Two Kinds of Interest. This feeling of so-called Effort indicates the two kinds of Interest recognized: (1) Immediate or Direct, and (2) Mediate or Derived. The former is where the self-expression puts itself forth with no thought of anything beyond. The end is the present activity. The mere pleasure of action or colors, or the excitement of a story, or of play and amusement is of this character. Derived Interest on the other hand gains its hold on our minds through association with something else that is interesting in itself, and the interest in the one is carried over to the other. Thus a time-table can be of utmost interest, if it concerns our own journey or that of some friend. Hard work ceases to be a drudgery when connected with some definite and appreciated result. This therefore is what we mean when we say, "Create Interest." It does not mean a false interest set up by colored chalk-lines, or bright figures or pictures with no meaning in themselves. It does not purpose jingly tunes or nonsensical motions for the attention, held momentarily and aimlessly. It means all the real, intrinsic connection of the subject with the child's own vital past experiences, with his own impulses to thought and action, giving self-expression to his own native or acquired wants and tendencies, and thus an interest in the subject in hand. Any other means, used to hold Attention, maintain Order, secure Study, gain Answers to Questions are false and worse than useless, being positively injurious, and creative of the permanent habit of Divided Attention or Mind-wandering. The same thing may elicit either Immediate or Derived Interest, according to circumstances. Thus riding a wheel would be Immediate Interest on a bright, cool day, when running along a good country road, leisurely riding for pleasure, in utmost enjoyment of every present moment. But riding that same wheel, on a hot, sultry day, on a dusty, poor road, up a steep hill, seeking to reach a certain destination on time, would represent Derived Interest, not Immediate or Spontaneous. That is, Derived Interest comes when the end is somewhat remote. Much of life is of this type. The business man plods through a laborious or unpleasant task, day after day, not for its intrinsic pleasure, not for the salary at the week's end, not even for the things that salary can buy at home, but ultimately for the love he bears his wife and family; Derived Interest, because the end is remote and effort bridges over the chasm between. Someone has said that all life is ruled by but two basal motives, Love and Duty; that the latter is really the former, where an ideal devotion to a principle demands a love that stands paramount to the love attaching to a person or a thing. Professor Gordy says: "The secret of interest is adaptation. The toys and playthings and pictures of a child amuse him because they are adapted to his state of development—they stimu late him to exercise his powers. What we must do in teaching, if we expect to interest our pupils, is to set them to do something that they are able to do, in order that they may acquire the power to do what they cannot do. We should constantly be striving at every stage of a child's development to learn the contents of his mind-to make an inventory of his capacities, so as to see which of them we may turn to educational account, and how. And here again we come upon the fact that meets us at every turn and corner of our experience in teaching-the necessity of a constant, careful, systematic study of our pupils, if we hope for the best success in teaching them. Unless we know them thoroughly, we cannot adapt our teachings to them perfectly." Thus the Interest is not in the thing, but in the person. You can never "make things interesting." They must be of a nature (and so well presented) as to attract the internal, natural interest of the individual approached. He already possesses the Interest: you merely give him the material. He already has the hunger: you give him the proper food. A full table does not create the hunger, it satisfies it, already there, though perhaps dormant. Everyone, always and at all times, has some Interest, unless he be unconscious or dead. He is bound to manifest that interest in something, if the right thing can be found and given to him. If he be lethargic, the fault is not in him, but in the material or its presentation, and so ultimately in the teacher. Three Causes of Interest. Thorndike says: "Much assistance is given to the teacher in this process of refining and redirecting interests by three facts. The first is the general law of association that whatever tendency brings satisfaction will be perpetuated and strengthened. Whenever an interest is made to profit a pupil, it will be preserved. Connect any response with an original or acquired satisfier and it will satisfy. The hardest sort of bodily labor becomes interesting when it gives a boy a place on the football team or connects with the excitement and achievement of hunting big game. The second is the force of imitation. What the community cares about will interest each new member; the teacher who is interested in a subject will infect her class. The third is the fact that knowledge breeds interest, that, with certain exceptions, the power to handle a subject produces in the long run an interest in it, uninteresting as it may have been at the start. As soon as the high-school pupil can really read German, he is likely to gain an interest in it." Practical Precepts. In his little pamphlet on How TO INTEREST, Mutch says: "Until after the kindergarten age the chief interest of childhood is in seeing. Show them something. They appreciate intensely a few things which appeal to the sense of taste. The touch is very sensitive to things cold or hot, and there are a few sounds which strongly appeal to the sense of hearing. But none of these have the great variety of interest which the child finds in the things seen." In Miss Slattery's book, TALKS WITH THE TRAINING CLASS, we read as follows: "Each year from my study of these papers, and the pupils who wrote them, I have been obliged to come to the same conclusion-namely, that all children are intensely interested in life and in great principles and truths as they touch life; and they are not interested in abstract statements of truth apart from life. "Real curiosity leads to interest. Interest means attention, attention means knowledge, and knowledge influences character and conduct. It is an endless chain. Strengthen the chain." Thorndike writes: "Other things being equal, get interest that is steady and self-sustaining rather than interest that flags repeatedly and has to be constantly reinforced by thoughts of duty, punishment, or the like. Get the right things done at any cost-but get them done with as little inhibition and strain as possible. Other things being equal, work with and not against instinctive interests. The problem of interest in teaching is not whether children shall learn with interest or without it; they never learn without it; but what kind of interest it shall be; from what the interest shall be derived." Killing Interest. Professor Adams remarks: "To arouse and sustain interest is of such vital moment in teaching that scarcely any attention has been given by writers to the almost equally important subject of satisfying or allaying interest. It is perhaps impossible |