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.

A certain doubt may now occur to some of you.  A while ago, apropos of the pugnacious instinct, I spoke of our modern pedagogy as being possibly too ‘soft.’  You may perhaps here face me with my own words, and ask whether the exclusive effort on the teacher’s part to keep the pupil’s spontaneous interest going, and to avoid the more strenuous path of voluntary attention to repulsive work, does not savor also of sentimentalism.  The greater part of schoolroom work, you say, must, in the nature of things, always be repulsive.  To face uninteresting drudgery is a good part of life’s work.  Why seek to eliminate it from the schoolroom or minimize the sterner law?

A word or two will obviate what might perhaps become a serious misunderstanding here.

It is certain that most schoolroom work, till it has become habitual and automatic, is repulsive, and cannot be done without voluntarily jerking back the attention to it every now and then.  This is inevitable, let the teacher do what he will.

It flows from the inherent nature of the subjects and of the learning mind.  The repulsive processes of verbal memorizing, of discovering steps of mathematical identity, and the like, must borrow their interest at first from purely external sources, mainly from the personal interests with which success in mastering them is associated, such as gaining of rank, avoiding punishment, not being beaten by a difficulty and the like.  Without such borrowed interest, the child could not attend to them at all.  But in these processes what becomes interesting enough to be attended to is not thereby attended to without effort.  Effort always has to go on, derived interest, for the most part, not awakening attention that is easy, however spontaneous it may now have to be called.  The interest which the teacher, by his utmost skill, can lend to the subject, proves over and over again to be only an interest sufficient to let loose the effort.  The teacher, therefore, need never concern himself about inventing occasions where effort must be called into play.  Let him still awaken whatever sources of interest in the subject he can by stirring up connections between it and the pupil’s nature, whether in the line of theoretic curiosity, of personal interest, or of pugnacious impulse.  The laws of mind will then bring enough pulses of effort into play to keep the pupil exercised in the direction of the subject.  There is, in fact, no greater school of effort than the steady struggle to attend to immediately repulsive or difficult objects of thought which have grown to interest us through their association as means, with some remote ideal end.