let their imaginations play about the current and familiar contacts and
events of life—about father and mother and friend, about steamboats and
locomotives, and sheep and cows, about the romance of farm and forest, of
seashore and mountain. What is needed, in a word, is to afford occasion
by which the child is moved to educe and exchange with others his store
of experiences, his range of information, to make new observations
correcting and extending them in order to keep his images moving,
in order to find mental rest and satisfaction in definite and vivid
realization of what is new and enlarging.
With the development of reflective attention come the need and the
possibility of a change in the mode of the child’s instruction. In the
previous paragraphs we have been concerned with the direct, spontaneous
attitude that marks the child till into his seventh year—his demand
for new experiences and his desire to complete his partial experiences
by building up images and expressing them in play. This attitude is
typical of what writers call spontaneous attention, or, as some say,
non-voluntary attention.
The child is simply absorbed in what he is doing; the occupation in which
he is engaged lays complete hold upon him. He gives himself without
reserve. Hence, while there is much energy spent, there is no _conscious_
effort; while the child is intent to the point of engrossment, there is
no _conscious_ intention.
With the development of a sense of more remote ends, and of the need
of directing acts so as to make them means for these ends (a matter
discussed in the second number), we have the transition to what is termed
indirect, or, as some writers prefer to say, voluntary, attention. A
result is imaged, and the child attends to what is before him or what
he is immediately doing because it helps to secure the result. Taken by
itself, the object or the act might be indifferent or even repulsive.
But because it is felt to belong to something desirable or valuable, it
borrows the latter’s attracting and holding power.
This is the transition to “voluntary” attention, but only the transition.
The latter comes fully into being only when the child entertains results
in the form of problems or questions, the solution of which he is to
seek for himself. In the intervening stage (in the child from eight to,
say, eleven or twelve), while the child directs a series of intervening
activities on the basis of some end he wishes to reach, this end is
something to be done or made, or some tangible result to be reached; the
problem is a practical difficulty, rather than an intellectual question.
But with growing power the child can conceive of the end as something to
be found out, discovered; and can control his acts and images so as to
help in the inquiry and solution. This is reflective attention proper.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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