=Educational Corollaries.=--First, to _strengthen attention in children_
who care nothing for the subject they are studying and let their wits go
wool-gathering. The interest here must be 'derived' from something that
the teacher associates with the task, a reward or a punishment if
nothing less internal comes to mind. If a topic awakens no spontaneous
attention it must borrow an interest from elsewhere. But the best
interest is internal, and we must always try, in teaching a class, to
knit our novelties by rational links on to things of which they already
have preperceptions. The old and familiar is readily attended to by the
mind and helps to hold in turn the new, forming, in Herbartian
phraseology, an '_Apperceptionsmasse_' for it. Of course the teacher's
talent is best shown by knowing what 'Apperceptionsmasse' to use.
Psychology can only lay down the general rule.
Second, take that mind-wandering which at a later age may trouble us
_whilst reading or listening to a discourse_. If attention be the
reproduction of the sensation from within, the habit of reading not
merely with the eye, and of listening not merely with the ear, but of
articulating to one's self the words seen or heard, ought to deepen
one's attention to the latter. Experience shows that this is the case.
I can keep my wandering mind a great deal more closely upon a
conversation or a lecture if I actively re-echo to myself the words than
if I simply hear them; and I find a number of my students who report
benefit from voluntarily adopting a similar course.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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