Читать книгу The Art of Foreign Language Teaching - Peter Lutzker - Страница 22

In the Anglo-American educational tradition, the concept of teaching as an art is generally considered to have a clearly defined origin.80 In 1892, the renowned psychologist and philosopher William James (1842–1910) was asked by Harvard University to give a series of public lectures on psychology to schoolteachers in Cambridge which were later published. In his lectures James draws clear distinctions between the insights which can be gained from the science of psychology and what is required in teaching:

I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind’s laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.81

He is clearly sceptical about the value of psychology in regard to the practical needs of his audience:

To know psychology, therefore is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher’s art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.82

Yet, despite his reservations, James goes on to give a number of suggestions derived from experimental psychology, emphasizing the importance of establishing positive educational habits and a broad base of tacit knowledge through making the “nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.”83 At the same time, he continually makes clear that the implementation of the principles of psychology in the classroom does not, in the end, depend on theoretical knowledge, but the teacher’s artistry in teaching:

The genius of the interesting teacher consists in sympathetic divination of the sort of material with which the pupil’s mind is likely to be already spontaneously engaged, and in the ingenuity which discovers paths of connection from that material to the matters to be newly learned. The principle is easy to grasp, but the accomplishment is difficult in the extreme. And a knowledge of such psychology as this which I am recalling can no more make a good teacher than a knowledge of the laws of perspective can make a landscape painter of effective skill.84

James’ entire view of teaching is based on a deep respect for the sovereign role of the teacher and a sceptical evaluation of the possibilities of science in advancing educational practice. His own concrete elucidation of the concept of teaching as an art is thus defined by what he considers to be the clear limits of educational psychology in assisting teachers to become better teachers. From the perspective of the leading psychologist of his day, the injunction that “inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation”85 and not the findings and methods of science were the basis of successful teaching, constituted an educational vision at the end of the 19^th century which was to have clear, practical ramifications in a number of reform movements at the beginning of the 20^th century in both the United States and Europe.86