Читать книгу Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education - Ontario. Department of Education - Страница 47

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Knowledge Gained Accidentally.—It is evident, however, that at times knowledge might be gained in the absence of any set problem upon which the learner reacts. For example, a certain person while walking along a road intent upon his own personal matters observed a boy standing near a high fence. On passing further along the street, he glanced through an opening and observed a vineyard within the inclosure. On returning along the street a few minutes later, he saw the same boy standing at a near by corner eating grapes. Hereupon these three ideas at once co-ordinated themselves into a new form of knowledge, signifying stealing-of-fruit. In such a case, the experience has evidently been gained without the presence of a problem to guide the selecting and relating of the ideas entering into the new knowledge. In like manner, a child whose only motive is to fill paper with various coloured crayon may accidentally discover, while engaged on this problem, that red and yellow will combine to make orange, or that yellow and blue will combine to make green. Here also the child gains valuable experience quite spontaneously, that is, without its constituting a motive, or problem, calling for adjustment.

Learning without Motive.—In the light of the above, a question suggests itself in relation to the lesson problem, or motive. Granting that a regular school recitation must contain some valuable problem for which the learning process is to furnish a solution, and granting that the teacher must be fully conscious both of the problem and of its mode of solution, the question might yet be asked whether a problem is to be realized by the child as a felt need at the beginning of the lesson. For example, if the teacher wishes his pupils to learn how to compose the secondary colour purple, might he have them blend in a purely arbitrary way, red and blue, and finally ask them to note the result? Or again, if he wishes the pupils to learn the construction of a paper-box or fire-place, would he not be justified in directing them to make certain folds, to do certain cutting, and to join together the various sections in a certain way, and then asking them to note the result? If such a course is permissible, it would seem that, so far at least as the learner is concerned, he may gain control of valuable experience, or knowledge, without the presence of a problem, or motive, to give the learning process value and direction.

Problem Aids Control.—It is true that in cases like the above, the child may gain the required knowledge. The cause for this is, no doubt, that the physical activity demanded of the pupil constitutes indirectly a motive for attending sufficiently to gain the knowledge. But in many cases no such conditions might exist. It is important, therefore, to have the pupil as far as possible realize at the outset a definite motive for each lesson. The advantage consists in the fact that the motive gives a value to the ideas which enter into the new knowledge, even before they are fully incorporated into a new experience. For example, if in a lesson in geometrical drawing, the teacher, instead of having the child set out with the problem of drawing a pair of parallel lines, merely orders him to follow certain directions, and then requests him to measure the shortest distance between the lines at different points, the child is not likely to grasp the connections of the various steps involved in the construction of the whole problem. This means, however, that the learner has not secured an equal control over the new experience.

Pupils Feel Its Lack.—A further objection to conducting a lesson in such a way that the child may find no motive for the process until the close of the lesson, is the fact that he is himself aware of its lack. In school the child soon discovers that in a lesson he selects and gives attention to various ideas solely in order to gain control over some problem which he may more or less definitely conceive in advance. For this reason, if the teacher attempts, as in the above examples, to fix the child's attention on certain facts without any conception of purpose, the pupil nevertheless usually asks himself the question: "What does the teacher intend me to do with these facts?" Indeed, without at least that motive to hold such disconnected ideas in his mind, it is doubtful whether the pupil would attend to them sufficiently to organize them into a new item of knowledge. When, therefore, the teacher proposes at the outset an attractive problem to solve, he has gone a long way toward stimulating the intellectual activity of the pupil. The setting of problems, the supplying of motives, the giving of aims, the awakening of needs—this constitutes a large part of the business of the teacher.