Here is an overview of the Preface and first four chapters of Talks for Teachers on Psychology by William James.

The preface explains that the book was developed from some public lectures given to teachers at Cambridge in 1892 as well as a several “addresses” delivered at women’s colleges.  James has edited the content to focus more on the practical than the theoretical and has eliminated the graphical outline of the text to help the reader focus on the overall impact of these principles on the mental life of the student.

In Chapter 1, James explains that principles developed from psychology won’t give teachers a clear prescription for how to teach, but they can provide some guidance and are useful when combined with an instructional ingenuity.  He also encourages teachers not to feel they must contribute to the study of psychology as part of their job.

I personally found it ironic when James praised the American education system at the time of his writing by saying “avoiding on the one hand the pure lecture-system prevalent in Germany and Scotland, which considers too little the individual student, and yet not involving the sacrifice of the instructor to the individual student, which the English tutorial system would seem too often to entail” (p. 1).  I don’t know much about schools in James’ day, but schools now seem to pendulum swing between these two extremes.  Too many students are lectured at, and in classrooms where this isn’t the case, there is often a heavy emphasis on discovery and student-centered learning, at the expense of teacher as more knowledgeable other.  I agree with James that we need a balance between these extremes.

In chapter 2, James defines “stream of consciousness” as the continual succession of sensory perceptions, feelings, thoughts and wills occurring in the human mind.  While many different kinds of mental impressions (i.e. feelings, senses, intentions, etc) occur simultaneously, there is an indeterminate flow between those which are the center of focus and those which exist on the margins of consciousness.

I experienced a good example of these concepts last Monday when I found myself worrying about an incident I had observed a few weeks ago.  I woke up in the morning thinking about something else entirely, but then the memory came back to me and became the focus of my attention.  Later I got up and went about my day, focusing on other things, but often, an unsettled feeling and vague memory of the incident remained on the margin of my thoughts while I did my work.  At times, my focus returned to the memory and the environment around me shifted into the peripheral.  Then I would get back to what I was doing, but I just couldn’t shake the idea from my mind completely, as these succession of thoughts passed through my mind. 

Chapter 3 describes the historical debate between which end result of one’s stream of consciousness, improved rational thought or impacted behavior, is more important, and makes the case for considering behavior primary since “stream of conscious” developed to help humans survive in the world and since action both makes deeper reflection possible and is also more related to abstract thought than is immediately obvious.

I love the tongue-in-cheek style of James’ writing when he notes that if people “emphasize the practical [over] the theoretical…a concrete victory over this earth’s outward powers of darkness would appear an equivalent for any amount of passive spiritual culture” (p. 11).  James is ironic here because surely we will not merely see them as equivalent, but recognize that “faith without works is dead” (James 2:20 New King James Bible).  It does no good to be a spiritual person if it doesn’t have some kind of impact on one’s life in the world. A humorous example of his distinction between the practical and rational occurred one night while my family was dining at a restaurant.  A napkin on a side table accidentally caught fire from a nearby candle.  While most of us debated the best course of action, noting “somebody ought to get a waiter”, my mother silently rose to her feet, grabbed a class of water, and extinguished the flame.  We were immediately awed by her active ingenuity in contrast with our dumb intellectualism.  We could have been caught in a blazing fire while we reasoned about the situation.  Clearly, thoughts have some value, but actions have more.

Chapter 4 continues the line of argument in Chapter 3 by giving examples of how the German and English school systems are each designed to produce particular kinds of behaviors in students.  William James puts forth a definition of education as “the organization of acquired habits of conduct and tendencies to behavior” (p. 15).

After reading this chapter, I’m reminded of Jerome Bruner’s (1996) discussion about the dialectic tension between the end goals of education.  Should schools prepare students for needed roles in society or should they help students to become self-actualized individuals?  For example, society needs a significant number of garbage collectors, but collecting garbage is probably not the highest aim of most individuals.  At the same time, society cannot function if all of its members are artists, writers, scientists or theoretical mathematicians.  James does not deal with this question, but his emphasis on the importance of behavior in setting instructional aims does raise the issue of which behaviors should be targeted for instruction.

References

Bruner, J. (1996). The culture of education. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

James, W. (1962). Talks to teachers on psychology and to students on some of life’s ideals. Mineola, NY: Dover.