Many great
psychologists have had little or no interest in teaching. Even eminent
specialists in electricity and chemistry have not often been those to
draw the immediate practical benefit from their studies. The
application of psychology to the work of instruction constitutes a
distinct field of inquiry and experiment. The output of the best
experimental thinking in this direction may be called pedagogy.
The process of induction or concept-building leads the mind, as above
indicated, through a series of different acts. We may first observe
how far the mind is unnaturally inclined to follow this process, and
whether it is a mark of healthy mental action in children and in
adults. Later we may examine more closely the successive stages in the
process itself.
To get at the _natural process_ it is well to observe first the action
of a _child's_ mind. By analyzing a simple case of a farmer's child we
may trace the mental steps in forming a general notion. So long as it
has seen no barn except that on its father's farm, the word _barn_
means to it only that particular object. But when it discovers that
one of the neighbors has a similar building called a barn, it learns to
put these different objects under one head, and the general notion
_barn_ as a building for horses, cattle, and feed, gradually rises in
the mind.
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