Talks to teachers on psychology : and to students on some of life's ideals / By William James.
| Author/creator | James, William |
| Other author | Taylor, Peter, 1917-1994, former owner. |
| Format | Book |
| Publication Info | New York : H. Holt, 1909 [©1900] |
| Description | xi, 301 pages ; 20 cm |
| Subjects |
| Contents | I. Talks to teachers : 1. Psychology and the teaching art : The American educational organization ; What teachers may expect from psychology ; Teaching methods must agree with psychology, but cannot be immediately deduced therefrom ; The science of teaching and the science of war ; The educational uses of psychology defined ; The teacher's duty toward child-study -- 2. The stream of consciousness : Our mental life is a succession of conscious 'fields' ; They have a focus and a margin ; This description contrasted with the theory of 'ideas' ; Wundt's conclusions -- 3. The child as a behaving organism : Mind as pure reason and mind as practical guide ; The latter view the more fashionable one to-day ; It will be adopted in this work ; Why so? ; The teacher's function is to train pupils to behavior -- 4. Education and behavior : Education defined ; Conduct is always its outcome ; Different national ideals: Germany and England -- 5. The necessity of reactions : No impression without expression ; Verbal reproduction ; Manual training ; Pupils should know their 'marks' -- 6. Native and acquired reactions : The acquired reactions must be preceded by native ones ; Illustration: teaching child to ask instead of snatching ; Man has more instincts than other mammals --7. What the native reactions are : Fear and love ; Curiosity ; Imitation ; Emulation ; Forbidden by Rousseau ; His error ; Ambition, pugnacity, and pride. Soft pedagogies and the fighting impulse ; Ownership ; Its educational uses ; Constructiveness ; Manual teaching ; Transitoriness in instincts ; Their order of succession -- 8. The laws of habit : Good and bad habits ; Habits due to plasticity of organic tissues ; The aim of education is to make useful habits automatic ; Maxims relative to habit-forming: 1. Strong initiative ; 2. No exception ; 3. Seize first opportunity to act ; 4. Don't preach ; Darwin and poetry: without exercise our capacities decay ; The habit of mental and muscular relaxation ; Fifth maxim, keep the faculty of effort trained ; Sudden conversions compatible with laws of habit ; Momentous influence of habits on character -- 9. The association of ideas : A case of habit ; The two laws, contiguity and similarity ; The teacher has to build up useful systems of association ; Habitual associations determine character ; Indeterminateness of our trains of association ; We can trace them backward, but not foretell them; Interest deflects ; Prepotent parts of the field ; In teaching, multiply cues -- 10. Interest : The child's native interests ; How uninteresting things acquire an interest ; Rules for the teacher ; 'Preparation' of the mind for the lesson: the pupil must have something to attend with ; All later interests are borrowed from original ones -- 11. Attention : Interest and attention are two aspects of one fact ; Voluntary attention comes in beats ; Genius and attention ; The subject must change to win attention ; Mechanical aids ; They physiological process ; The new in the old is what excites interest ; Interest and effort are compatible ; Mind-wandering ; Not fatal to mental efficiency -- 12. Memory : Due to association ; No recall without a cue ; Memory is die to brain plasticity ; Native retentiveness ; Number of associations may practically be its equivalent ; Retentiveness is a fixed property of the individual ; Memory versus memories ; Scientific systems as help to memory ; Technical memories ; Cramming ; Elementary memory unimprovable ; Utility of verbal memorizing ; Measurements of immediate memory ; They throw little light ; Passion is the important factor in human efficiency ; Eye-memory, ear-memory- etc. ; The rate of forgetting ; Ebbinghaus's results ; Influence of the unreproducible ; To remember, one must think and connect --13. The acquisition of ideas : Education gives a stock of conceptions ; The order of their acquisition ; Value of verbal material ; Abstractions of different orders: when are they assimilable ; False conceptions of children -- 14. Apperception : Often a mystifying idea ; The process defined ; The law of economy ; Old-fogyism ; How many types of apperception? ; New heads of classification must continually be invented ; Alteration of the apperceiving mass ; Class names are what we work by ; Few new fundamental conceptions acquired after twenty-five -- 15. The will : The word defined ; All consciousness tends to action ; Ideo-motor action ; Inhibition ; The process of deliberation ; Why so few of our ideas result in acts ; The associationist account of the will ; A balance of impulses and inhibitions ; The over-impulsive and the over-obstructed type ; The perfect type ; The balky will ; What character building consists in ; Right action depends on right apperception of the case ; Effort of will is effort of attention: the drunkard's dilemma ; Vital importance of voluntary attention ; Its amount may be indeterminate ; Affirmation of free-will ; Two types of inhibition ; Spinoza on inhibition by a higher good -- II. Talks to students : 1. The gospel of relaxation -- 2. On a certain blindness in human beings -- 3. What makes a life significant?. |
| Local note | Joyner Wright Coll. copy has handwritten quote from Henry van Dyke: "Life is an arrow..." on front fly-leaf. Other notes inside back cover. Peter Taylor name label inside front cover. Stuart Wright Peter Taylor Book Collection #24. See also related manuscript material in the Stuart Wright Collection, #1169, in Joyner Library Special Collections. |
| Acquisitions source | Joyner Wright Coll. copy gift of Stuart Wright, 2014 |
| Issued in other form | Online version: James, William, 1842-1910. Talks to teachers on psychology. New York, H. Holt, 1906 [©1900] |
| LCCN | 07024573 |
Availability
| Library | Location | Call Number | Status | Item Actions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Joyner | Stuart Wright Collection | LB1051 .J34 1909 | ✔ Available | Request Material |