Jacques Barzun in a number of places highly recommends William James’ book of collected lectures, which he refers to as Talks to Teachers. Perusing the library catalog, I was unable to tell whether this referred to the volume found there as Talks to Teachers and Students or the one titled Talks to Teachers on Psychology, so I requested both – and found out they are in fact essentially the same book.
Wikipedia informs me that the full publication title in 1899 was Talks to Teachers on Psychology: and to Student’s on Some of Life’s Ideals – which was quite sensibly shortened to “Teachers and Students” for the second edition in 1900. The talks for teachers were given at what the preface indicates we would call a professional development workshop in 1892 for, from the content, mainly high school teachers in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the “students” addressed were, however, evidently James’s own pupils at Harvard.
James’s preface explicitly includes the first lecture “to students” as following on the same subject matter of the classroom, but admits the final two are really on a separate subject – mainly, a presentation of James’s theory of individualism of pluralism. The 1939 reprint, having excised those final two lectures, kept just the first part of the original title; while Wikipedia’s entry indicates the latest reprint reproduces the full 1899 version, with its extensive title.
Having no training in the subject, I have no sure way to judge to what extent the content of James’s formal psychology holds up. He deliberately in these lectures limited the technical content, preferring to talk in more commonplace about how the ways students behave can be understood and should influence how teachers teach. As an outline manual for thinking about the classroom, it seems to me to hold up quite well.
James defines education as “the organizaing of resources in the human being of powers of conduct which shall him him to his social and physical world”. He makes the business of teaching the process of training students to react appropriately to what is received and perceived: and then spends quite a deal of time discussing how inputs are received, what instincts a teacher can appeal to, and his understanding of learning as a process of making appropriate and useful associations, which leads him to stress the importance of good habits.
The talks are, understandably for what looks like lecture notes for one week of relatively short sessions, not fully fleshed out in some ways. James stresses that this conception of “education” is not simply academic but that the best-educated student would be bodily fit and have acquired any number of useful skills. This seems to me a tall order for any school to manage on its own, but then he was talking to teachers. While family or other social institutions barely appear, it is difficult to tell exactly how much of this program James thought could or should be taught in schools. His more specific advice is clearly given with the academic classroom in mind.
In the classroom, he advocates presenting a subject in as many ways as possible – although I found it interesting that he is clearly aware that not every teacher has the same gifts of presentation, an admission today’s pedagogical experts seem unwilling to make. Similarly, he talks about the variety of ways students can learn, but is unwilling to commit himself to trying to define what we would call “learning styles” – and in fact he is actively skeptical of schemes for trying to pin down and classify such things. He strongly recommends, as much as possible, keeping students’ attention – or regaining it when it wanders – not by threat of consequences but by actively engaging interest. However, he is again realistic enough to acknowledge such discipline in his methods and stresses that while maintaining student interest is a mark of an ideal teacher, this should not be pursued at the expense of rigor in the work and again he recognizes that not all teachers are ideal.
Of the three lectures to his own students, the last two as mentioned do not really address the subject of education at all. If there is a continuity with the rest of the lectures, it is in their individualism or pluralism. For all his insight on managing a classroom and understanding students, James avoided any specific comments on curriculum. At the same time, there is a discord between the main lectures and these last two. James’s educated man will be able to respond appropriately in as many circumstances as possible, and here we are directed to appreciate all of the ways in which our fellow-men may live: good so far.
The conflict, though, appears when you contrast James’s quite conventional approach to forming good and bad habits – which is to say, pursuing virtues and avoiding vice – in the main lectures with his almost formless theory of almost anti-Platonic “ideals” which are and even can be only determined by each individual for himself. I am inclined to suspect he included these two lectures or essays almost as a counterweight to the conventionality of the main body of the work: a sort of attempt to express his own views honestly either as they really were or perhaps as they had changed in the years since he gave the talks to teachers in Cambridge originally.
The first of the these three talks to his own students, however, does touch directly on education, and “The Gospel of Relaxation” borrows its title, and evidently its theme (although supported by other authorities) from advice given by Annie Payson Call. While his tacit endorsement of the 19th century British psychologist who held up the British as a model – chiefly for their easier pace and air of imperturbability – may seem mostly amusing, the theme overall sounds shockingly topical. He observes that America is all hustle and overwork, and so advises – don’t stress over the work of the moment but keep working at a sound pace; focus on the work and not yourself; and so on.
Romance of Victory 