My dear Friend,
Habits are the self---the living, wanting, needing self; they are in truth the human will, the urge to act in specific ways for specific ends.
Habits are therefore active means when they impel the individual to respond to environing forces in a specific manner to realize specific ends.
A traditional view of habits, as I said in my first letter, is that they are self-generating within the organis. Being formed in this way, a bad habit can be explained as the resut of evil inherent in the orgainism.
Many traditional moralists have implemented this idea with another, declaring that the evil in the organism is attributable to the machinations of a personal devil. As the precise antithesis to this devil, or center of wickedness, they have offered a personal God, the supreme power and center of righteousness.
Evil inheres in us, these ladies and gentlemen say, because Adam and Eve, having been created as perfect or near-perfect beings and placed in a garden of bliss. listened to the promptings of God's archenemy, the devil, and indulged a God forbidden habit. Since that most unfortunate incident some thousands of years ago, we have had to fight the evil that is an essential, ever-present element of our nature and also the villainy of the devil, who can now appeal to our wicked natures.
These supernaturalists are quite sure that man, whom God made from the soil of the earth, and woman, whom God, in a moment of afterthought, made from a rib of the first man, must seek to improve their nature and hence their habits by close attention to an absolutist code of commandments alleged to have been given by God and to which he demands of man strict conformity in practice as well as thought. And in our struggle with the devil and his forces of wickedness within us, we should trust implicitly in, and always to, the supernatural for further guidance and enlightenment. The first man and woman displeased God; and that one misstep is declared to be the cause of all the misery and suffering humanity has had to bear, all the evil in our natures, all (this follows logically) our bad habits.
If these are the antecedent circumstances, it is not unreasonable to suppose, as indeed such supernaturalists do, that improvement in our natures and habits must come from our submission and appeal to God, the supreme power and center of goodness and virtue.
Science has a different analysisi, a different synthesis, a different approach.
Instead of teaching that man began as a perfect or near-perfect being and fell, by displeasing his creator, God, from this height to his subsequent low estate of poverty, disease, back-breaking toil, mortality, wickedness, and miscellaneous devilments, science says that he began in the extremely remote past as a minute organism in the warm waters of the sea, an organism that is thought to have itself grown or emerged from inorganic substances, and that this little progenitor of all organic life can be traced through the lower to the higher genera of flora and fauna till it culminates in man, the supreme achievement of nature on planet Earth.
The Earth, not the center of the Universe as supernaturalists have taught, is seen to be one of the smallest planets of a solar system that itself is only a mior system among a number incalculable in infinity. Man, not a being for whom all nature was created, is seen to be a product of nature, the highest achievement of the evolutionary process on a relatively small satellite of a relatively small sun.
For science, man has in the long view forever progressed from the simple to the complex, from little knowledge to much, from little intelligence to his present abilities, from lower to higher moral conceptions.
An enthralling picture, is it not?--A sweeping, vivid glimpse of the greatest drama ever enacted on planet Earth, a beautiful lyric, epic poetry in the grand style, a vision of truth, goodness, and beauty.
It gives us understanding, an understanding that comes from knowledge of what is true. When knowledge and understanding are gained, superstition and magic, with all their cruelties and progress-retarding mechanisms, lose their grip on the mins of men. Science has progressively enlared, and continues to enlarge, the areas of experience in which knowledge and understanding have replaced superstition and magic.
We have been comparing a supernatural version of man's origin with the version taught by science.
The theory of evolution has been accepted by science for many years; today scientists do not doubt the facts of man's evolution, though dispute is interminable regarding how evolution has been achieved. There are, for example, the Darwinian theory of natural selection, the Lamarkian theory of modification by inheritance of acquired characteristics, and the DeVries's mutation theory. It would seem probable, on the evidence, that all three of these explanations are in some degree true; and that other factors, still unknown or inadequately understood, have also played their part.
The traditional Christian teaching has been that man has lived on the Earth several thousand years since his creation in the Garden of Eden. Other religions have their own stories of the race's origin and age.
Science, on the other hand, states confidently that man has existed as man at least half a million years; and this statement is not a guess, but an estimate based on the facts revealed by geology, archaelology, anthropology, and other sciences. The skeletal remains of ancient man are mute, but they tell their story nevertheless.
A careful study of biological evolution has persuaded men and women who know most about the relevant facts that all organic life, the flora and fauna, had their origin millions of years ago in the warm waters of the sea. It is also thought---though direct proof is of course unavailable---that these minute marine creatures, the progenitors of all our organic life, themselves somehow grew or emerged from the world of inorgaic substances.
The following statements are truth beyond question and may be given categorically as such:
(1) When one studies the Primates, one finds there are greater differences between the higher and the lower Primates than there are between the higher Primates and man.
(2) When one studies the animals and plants, one finds a point in their evolution where the one tends to merge into the other; where forms of life now existing might be classified as either.
(3) When one studies the simplest forms of organic life know, one finds a point at which these simplest organic structures tend to merge imperceptibly into substances of the inorgaic world. Again
it becomes difficult to discriminate.
For full discussion of the evidence on evolution one must go to heavy tomes---to such a book as, say, Richard S. Lull's ORGANIC EVOLUTION.
It may finally be emphasized that evolution is not cnfined to organic life, but is an eternal, vital principle of inorganic substances also, and of social institutions, including religion itself. In sum, there are no objects or beings and no relationships, that are not subject to evolutionary laws.
We return now, with better understanding, to a consideration of human nature and conduct and specifically of habit and will.
It has been commonly held that, if one has an incorrect habit, all that is necessary to substitute a good one is to get the idea of the latter and will the change. Then the reconstruction of habit will take place without great difficulty.
This view, one perceives, is congenial to the traditional religious teaching that the organism is to get the correct idea of moral habits from supernatural sources. If one believes sufficiently, or has a strong enough faith, habits will automatically be changed.
Science answers that the right idea is the right habit.
We may wish or pray for, or will, a different habit endlessly; but, unless actual stes are taken toward a reconstruction of the present habit, no change will occur. In the recnstruction o habits involved in learning strokes in tennis, the thought of the new stroke does not roduce it in fact. It becomes operative only as we make different responses in an attempt to attain what we desire and profess to know. The correct idea is really gained only as we acquire the correct habit.
Tennis strokes may in general be considered non-moral. But habits in which morality is involved are essentially the same in this respect. While it is commonly supposed that a person knows what is morally right even when he acts in an immoral manner, science does not agree.
The right knowledge, the true idea, comes only as the correct habit patterns are actually formed in experience.
The implications for educational theory and practice are clear and unmistakable.
The learner does not acquire the correct habits of problem-solving and thinking by being told about them. He does acquire these habits by doing them, by learning the technique in actual experience. Then the idea, being active and operative, takes on meaning for the learner and is truly known.
I like to mention arithmetic, spelling, and grammar as examples.
Arithmetic is not properly learned by memorizing rules, nor is algebra, nor geometry. The rules take on meaning and are usable only as they are learned in a context of experience, in practical mathematical operations. Rules that are memorized are meaningless and soon forgotten, since they are divorced from the context in which meaning could adhere. The rules should be learned incidentally in t;he course of the actual mathematical operations. Correct habits are thus formed; and these habits become for all practical purposes the rule.
Spelling, too, has been taught in the past, and is often still taught, in a manner that is psychologically indefensible.
One of the most monstrous educational blunders is to compile lists of words that some educator thinks children at various age levels should know, and then to drill pupils in the spelling of them.
Often words have been selected that have littleor no relation to the pupil's vocabulary needs, in childhood or adulthood. This is illustrated expecially in the case of the old-fashioned spelling contests, when a premium was placed on the spelling of long words that the speller would probably never use. A truer psychology---the psychology I am writing about in these letters---teaches that the spelling of a word should be undertaken as use for that word develops in the child's experience in or out of school. And to wish or will to spell a word is to remain powerless unless the wish or will becomes the actual operational technique involved in the learning process---unless correct habits of learning to spell are extablished.
My third example is grammar, a field in which the point of view I entertain hason at least one occasion cooked my goose with traditionalists.
The traditional conception is that grammar can be taught only directly as such; that a pupil cannot learn to write correctly if he has not antecedently mastered grammatical rules.
I have in my own experience encountered traditionalists who insist that no one can possibly learn to write by any other method. I have heard teachers-in-training counseled to teach their pupils "grammar, grammar, grammar, and more grammar. They can learn in no other way. You will not have many young Cambells." Yet the College of Education was simultaneously teaching the greater desirablility of teaching another procedure, based on the concepts of John Dewey.
I knew that my ability, whatever it might be, had been acquired by a different method; and it was irritatingly obvious that I could write correctly, while the lassies who could diagram charmingly often found it difficult to write intelligibly and to recognize sentences in which their rules were violated with frightful abandon.
What I drive at is that I believed than, and believe now, that traditional grammar teaching is nonsense. A pupil should learn the mechanics of writing by actually writing; as the need for grammar is revealed by this laboratory techique, it should be learned as an integral part of usage. The "rule" then becomes simply usage, or the habits involved in correct writing. Grammatical rules are almost unconsciouslyly and imperceptibly fused in habits of correct writing.
This is the way I learned; it is the psychology I am presently discussing.
During the course of a conversation yesterday, I commented that, when people do not understand the cause-and-effect relationships or sequence of a problem or situation, they often explain events by superstition and attempt to control or alter them by magic. Throughout man's history the area in which magic is relied upon has progressively become smaller as scientific research has revealed these cause-and-effect sequences.
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