Talks To Teachers On Psychology

es — Illustration: teaching child to ask instead of

ne his reactions, and the purpose of his education is to make them numerous and perfect. Our education means, in short, little more than a mass of p

le which underlies the whole process of acquisition and

grafted on a native reaction, or a substitute for a native

or complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympat

rn the new things you wish to impart, except by soliciting him in the first instance by something which natively makes him react. He must take the first step himself. He must do something before you can get your purchase on him. That something may be something good or something ba

ld has a native tendency to snatch with his hands at anything that attracts his curiosity; also to draw back his han

awn, and the child cries. You then hold up the toy, smiling and saying, “Beg for it nicely — so!” The child stops crying, imitates you, receives the toy, and crows with pleasu

he child, at the very instant of snatching, recalls the rest of the earlier experience, thinks of the slap and the frustration, recollects the begging and the reward, inhibits the snatching impulse, substitutes the ‘nice’ reaction for it, and gets the toy immediately, by eliminat

diagram can be little more than a symbolic translation of the immediat

1. THE BRAIN-PROCESS

e dotted lines that lead from them to the higher centres and connect the latter together, represent the p

E 2. THE BRAIN-PROCE

, inhibits the snatch, and makes it abortive, so it is represented only by a dotted line of discharge not reaching the terminus. Ditto of the cry reaction. These are, as it were, short-circuited by the current swee

ive tendencies — the impulses and instincts of childhood — so as to be a

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ppealed to by a much larger array of objects than any other mammal, that his reactions on these objects are characteristic and determinate in a very high degree. The monkeys, and especially the anthropoids, are the only beings that approach him in their analytic curiosity and width of imitativeness. His instinctive impulses, it is true, get

tinctive tendencies which are the most important