How can teachers “get through” to students? How did the influential teachers that taught me in elementary school, middle school, high school, and college get through to me? What were their devices? How did they practice the science or the art of teaching? I discuss these things with my students who are preparing to teach history in high school. Is teaching a science or an art? And is it possible, after all, to teach someone how to teach? We discuss these things.
Just last week I plucked from my bookshelves at home a worn volume, published in 1914.
Nothing but the cutting edge of research for me! The pragmatic psychologist William James published a series of “talks” he had given in 1892 as public lectures at Harvard. The author of the influential “The Varieties of Religious Experience” now turned his attention to the topic of teaching in “Talks to Teachers on Psychology: And to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals.” James applied his understanding of psychology to the art of teaching.
James made it clear where he stood on the question of whether teaching is an art or a science. “Psychology is a science,” he wrote, “and teaching is an art.” Furthermore, he stated, “sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves.” Now, I realize I am out of my element here. My colleagues in the Department of Psychology or over at the College of Education know and teach the literature on teaching and learning. Still, William James makes a great deal of sense to me when he asserted that “the science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly.”
We teach certain scientific principles in our various disciplines. For example, in the discipline of history we teach how to collect and analyze data from primary and secondary sources.
In history, we applaud the rigor of scientific analysis. According to James, science can “help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticize ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.”
James continued, “A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall positively do within those lines is left exclusively to this own genius. One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently.”
I am not sure that my teachers were all geniuses, but I do know that they had a genius for opening up the world to me. I am sure they learned how to do that not in a college class such as my Teaching History course. I am sure, instead, that they learned the art of teaching on the fly, in the classroom and at home as they prepared for each new day. Or as James put it, “the art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation.”
To know history, or any other discipline, to have a head knowledge of the subject matter is not enough. The teachers who inspired me knew their history and literature and science and mathematics, to be sure, but they also knew something else. They knew how to animate the subject. Or as James put it, teachers “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.”
William James spoke from his own experience, but this has been my experience as a student as well. “In teaching,” James said, “you must simply work your pupil into such a state of interest in what you are going to teach . . . that every other object of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in connection with the subject are.”
I do not remember much of the subject matter that my teachers taught me years ago (although I must have absorbed more than I think), but “to my dying day” I will remember how the women and men who taught me so well worked me up “into such a state of interest” that I was thirsty for more. I am still trying to quench that thirst.
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