Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, HeredityGruenberg, Sidonie Matsner
Science
Your Child: Today and Tomorrow: Some Problems for Parents Concerning Punishment, Reasoning, Lies, Ideals and Ambitions, Fear, Work and Play, Imagination, Social Activities, Obedience, Adolescence, Will, Heredity
Gruenberg, Sidonie Matsner
Children
But what happens in the course of this forced practise? There is
resentment, and antagonism and a growing hatred of scales, of the
man who first vented scales, of sloping rows of notes on the page of
music. And this resentment is more likely to prevent a real mastery
of the task than the enforced practise is to ensure it. The
antagonism will, at any rate, counteract the value of the practise
to a large degree. The third element in the fixation of habits that
we have heretofore too generally disregarded is that of
_satisfaction_; this is no less important than regularity and
frequency of action.
The absence of satisfaction, to say nothing of the presence of
opposite feelings, is of itself sufficient to prevent effective
learning, whether of knowledge or of skill. And when the opposite
feelings are present, the acquired act or idea tends to be pushed
out of the system at the earliest opportunity. It is in some such
way as this that many specialists in the workings of the human mind
would explain so much of our "forgetting." They say that we forget
either because we really wish to forget--the facts are unpleasant--
or because we do not sufficiently care to remember--the facts are
not sufficiently interesting, they do not sufficiently concern us.
Out of the psychological facts pertaining to the relation of the
feeling state to the learning process and to the habit-forming
process, is developed the doctrine of "interest" in education. The
very name "interest" suggests to many that this must be some plan
for sugar-coating education, or perhaps for giving children only
what they like. And this is quite the opposite of the traditional
view which is expressed by the humorist who said, "It does not
matter much what you teach a boy, so long as he doesn't like it."
But the idea of interest in modern psychology does not mean letting
the child have his own way, any more than discipline means doing
only what is unpleasant or difficult.
We can see the basic truth at the foundation of this view in the
age-long usage of the race, which awards prizes and penalties for
"good" actions and "evil" actions, respectively. If you should be
asked "_Why_ did you reward Maryann," "_Why_ did you punish Henry;"
you would no doubt say something like this: If we reward a child for
doing what we approve, he is more likely to do that sort of thing
again; if we punish, or impose unpleasant consequences, upon acts that
we disapprove, such acts are less likely to be repeated. In other
words, we have known right along that _satisfaction_ somehow leads the
child to repeat the conditions that brought about the satisfaction;
and that suffering somehow leads the child to avoid the conditions
that brought about the suffering.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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