Interest and education : the doctrine of interest and its concrete application / by Charles De Garmo.

De Garmo, Charles, 1849-1934.

Date:: 1902

Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: Interest and education : the doctrine of interest and its concrete application / by Charles De Garmo. Source: Wellcome Collection.

229/256 (page 209)

only memorize and recite. He has no oppor- tunity, not to say incentive, to work things out in accordance with his own initiative, and by his own ingenuity. Thinking is, however, a vital element in genuine interest, since it contains the idea of an end to be reached by a series of activities. It is unfortunate for the school that current misconception attaches the idea of thinking almost entirely to the enforced activity of the will. ‘Voluntary’ attention is thought to be the result of unpleasant effort, the dead strain of determination. Even Professor Ribot appears, from the following, to hold this errone- ous opinion:1 — Voluntary or artificial attention is a product of art, of education, of direction, and of train- ing. It is grafted, as it were, upon spontaneous or natural attention, and finds in the latter its condition of existence, as the graft does in the stalk into which it has been inserted. In spontaneous attention the object acts by its intrinsic power; in voluntary attention the sub- ject acts through extrinsic, that is, through 1 “ The Psychology of Attention,” p. 35.