William James: Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some Of Life's Ideals

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William James gives teachers lots of issues to ponder. However, quite a few question stand out in my mind. The one that keeps coming up for me is, how does an unconscious thought or action move to our consciousness? William James talks about the fact that even our consciousness is "unclear and hazy." (p. 9) If this statement is true then how can he say that consciousness leads to knowledge and action?

In our discussion in class on the definition of learning, we discussed unconscious and consciousness as it relates to whether a person has learned a particular thing. We could not concretely decide if learning is a conscious or unconscious effort because we realized that somehow we remember things that we were not consciously paying attention to. This made us question whether remembering something meant that a person has actually learned it.

James mentioned in the text that a person couldn’t just sit quietly without some sort of action. Listening involves some sort of physiological response. He proposes that even if a person sits and does nothing but listen he or she is moving their eyes and thus moving some of the muscles within their body. (p. 18) Is this an example of conscious or unconscious process? It would seem as if the explanations also lead to more questions.

There was also mention of the connectedness of psychology to teaching. James admonished teachers that the very things that they are taught to focus on is the unimportant thing as it relates to educating the young. According to James, teaching and psychology are as equally important, neither more important than the other. Teaching involves the task of just "supervising" the process by which the child is learning (p. 20). If this is the case then are we saying that learning is innate? If an individual lacks the "innate" capability then are we also saying that they are incapable of learning?

Even further, James proposed that any acquisition is just an addition to or a substitution of what a child by nature already knows (p. 20). "The teacher's art consists in bringing about the substitution or complication, and success in the art presupposes a sympathetic acquaintance with the reactive tendencies natively there." (p. 20) In the case of special education and specifically those individuals with intellectual disabilities, the teachers are given the task of training individuals to perform functional skills that are not "native" to them. So if a teacher just sits back and guides the learning, these specific skills may not be acquired and these individuals may only be able to adapt to their environment with very little successes.