LEADING LEARNING THEORIES IN WESTERN EDUCATION BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY:

Study Notes

MENTAL DISCIPLINE: Man's Oldest Teaching Strategy

Mental discipline, means that learning consists of students' minds being disciplined or trained. In teaching nonreaders to read, teachers who are committed to mental discipline teach in such a way as to exercise the "muscles" of students' minds. These teachers would list words that they wanted students to be able to recognize, read, and spell, using flash cards in teaching them. They would drill their students extensively, test them daily, and have the low achievers return after school for further drill.

There would be "recitations," within which students would be drilled orally and take turns reading passages of their daily lessons. Those who did poorly would be scolded when they made mistakes, and some would be sent to their seats to "study." Students would be driven to stay with their lessons, thereby strengthening their perseverance and willpower. Strict discipline would be maintained in order to strengthen the faculty of attention as well as those of memory, will, and perseverance. The teacher would have little hesitation in using various kinds of punishment, as the situation required.

In ancient civilizations, particularly in the schools for scribes in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and among craft and formal "schools" of Ancient India and China, this elements of this strategy was employed.  Any approach to teaching and learning that emphasizes rote memory coupled with severe or harsh punishment for errors may be characterized as belonging to the "mental discipline school."

What Is Mental Discipline?

1. The central idea in mental discipline is that the mind, envisioned as a nonphysical substance, lies dormant until it is exercised.

2. Faculties of the mind such as memory, will, reason, and perseverance are the "muscles of the mind"; like physiological muscles, they are strengthened only through exercise, and subsequent to their adequate exercise they operate automatically. Thus, learning is a matter of strengthening, or disciplining, the faculties of the mind, which combine to produce intelligent behavior.

3. Adherents of mental discipline think that the primary value of history or any other disciplinary subject is the training effect it has on the minds of students.

They are convinced that this effect will remain after the "learned" material has been forgotten. Furthermore, they consider the highest value of education to be its liberalizing effect. Education that is truly liberalizing prepares us not only to live in the world, but more important, to live with ourselves.

4. James D. Koerner, a contemporary exponent of mental discipline, has written:

"The purpose of [liberalizing] education is the harmonious development of the mind, the will, and the conscience of each individual so that he may use to the full of his intrinsic powers and shoulder the responsibilities of citizenship."

5. According to the doctrine of mental discipline, a person is either a bad-active or neutral-active "rational animal," and education is a process of disciplining or training minds, which are the most essential aspects of persons.

Proponents believe that in this disciplining process mental faculties are strengthened through exercise. Just as exercising an arm develops the biceps, exercise of mental faculties makes them more powerful.

6. Choice of learning materials is of some importance but is always secondary to the nature of minds, which undergo the disciplinary process.

Within mental discipline, persons are thought to be composed of two kinds of basic substances of realities, namely, rational minds and biological organisms. Thus, the concept "rational animal" is used in characterizing a human being. That which is disciplined or trained through education is mind substance.

WHAT IS MIND SUBSTANCE?

7. Mind substance is a self-dependent, immaterial essence or genuine being, which parallels the physical nature of human beings; it is just as real as matter, has a nature of its own, and operates in its own distinctive fashion.

Furthermore, it usually is assigned the dominant position in a mind-body dualistic conception of humankind. Physical substance-rocks, buildings, plants, and animals-is characterized by extension in time and space; it has length, breadth, thickness, and mass.

8. Mind substance, in contrast, is not extended; it has no length, breadth, thickness, or mass, yet it is as real as anything can be. In a sense, a human being is considered a mental and physical whole. However, body and mind are of such a nature as to have no common characteristic.

9. How did primitive people acquire the idea that they had substantive minds? We do not know, but it is plausible to suppose that dreaming was partially responsible.

Picture hunters A and B lying down together after a hard day's hunting and a heavy feast. Hunter A has eaten too much and as a result is unable to sleep. Having been more moderate in his eating, hunter B sleeps all night, but his sleep includes an adventurous dream. Upon awakening in the morning, hunter B relates the experience of finding and stalking game during the night. Hunter A expresses disbelief and insists that hunter B has been on the ground beside him all night. But hunter B is equally insistent that he spent the night hunting and describes his dream so convincingly that both men decide that there must be two hunter B's. One, the physical person, slept on the ground throughout the night; the other, the mental person, must have come from within the first and carried on his escapades unhampered by bodily form. Thus, something like a modern concept of mind substance could have been born.

10. The mind substance concept has grown through the inventive genius of both primitive and civilized people, and it has become deeply embedded in present-day cultures. Consequently, quite often its existence is considered a self- evident truth; the familiar has come to be accepted as the self-evident.

A defensible mind substance theory must take mind out of space completely. As long as one attributes to mind some characteristics of matter, even though they are very thin and elusive, one implies that mind is of essentially the same nature as matter.

Thus, to gain an understanding of a mind substance theory of learning, one must make a sharp distinction between mind and matter, and one must recognize that if a mind is nonspatial, it cannot be located in the brain or anywhere else, and that, to date, we have devised no way of determining experimentally the way in which spatial and nonspatial entities influence each other.

11. If one adheres to a mind substance theory, each student's substantive mind is assumed to be active in either an erroneous or inadequate fashion until it is either curbed or trained.

Hence, one sees all learning as basically a process of developing or training minds.

12. Accordingly, learning becomes a process of inner development within which various powers such as imagination, memory, will, and thought are cultivated. Education becomes a process of m

WHAT FORMS MAY MENTAL DISCIPLINE TAKE?

13. The theory of mental discipline has at least two principal versions -classical humanism end faculty psychology.

Each is an outgrowth of different cultural traditions. Classical humanism stems from ancient Greece. It operates on the assumption that the mind of a human being is an active agent in relation to its environment and that it is also morally neutral at birth.

14. Humanism is an outlook and way of life that is centered upon human interests and values. Classical humanism is only one of its forms. Two other quite different forms of humanism are existentialist humanism and scientific humanism.

Existentialist humanism emphasizes the autonomous, active nature of human beings within which each person "does one's own thing." This type of humanism includes a self-actualization psychology of learning .

Scientific humanists emphasize the enhancement of human welfare through the application of scientific processes to the solution of the prevailing social problems of human beings. This kind of humanism harmonizes best with cognitive-interactionist psychologies of learning.

15. Faculty psychology more often is associated with the bad-active principle of human nature than with the earlier Greek neutral-active principle. Because of differences in underlying assumptions concerning the basic nature of human beings, we find some difference between the kinds of education prescribed by classical humanists and that prescribed by faculty psychologists. However, all mental disciplinary approaches to learning have enough in common for them to be placed in a mind substance family.

Mental Discipline Within the Classical Humanistic Tradition

16. Within the classical-humanistic tradition,

·a human mind is assumed to be of such nature that, with adequate cultivation, it can know the world as it really is.

17. A person being a rational animal means that the person is free within limits to act as one chooses in the light of what one understands. Instead of being creatures of instinct, humankind enjoys a complex and delicate faculty of apprehension, whose basic aspect is reason.

This capacity resides in every normal human individual and enables human beings to gain understanding of their needs and their environment, to direct their action in accordance with their understanding, and to communicate this understanding to other members of their group.

18.. Thus, the human mind is of such a nature that if it has been properly exercised and has an opportunity, it will educe truth, and thereby develops outward manifestations of its innate potential. Within the classical-humanistic frame of reference, knowledge assumes the character of a fixed body of true principles, handed down as a heritage of humankind.

19. These principles have been discovered by the great thinkers of human history and set down in the great books. Hence, classicists take the basic content of the school curriculum from philosophical and literary classics. To them, not only training the mind, but also studying the eternal truths contained in certain great books, is of primary importance.

Mental Discipline Implemented by Faculty Psychology

20. Although faculty psychology had been implicit in the classical tradition, it did not appear as an explicit, formalized psychological doctrine until the eighteenth century. Christian Wolff (1679-1754), a German philosopher, is credited with its development. His version was described in his Rational Psychology, published in 1734.

21. Wolff's thesis was that the mind, although unitary, has different faculties that are distinct.

The mind at times enters into particular activities in much the same way that the whole body at different times takes part in widely different acts.

According to Wolff, the basic general faculties are knowing, feeling, and willing.

·The knowing faculty is divided into several others, which include perception, imagination, memory, and pure reason. The reasoning faculty is the ability to draw distinctions and form judgments.

·The belief in a willing faculty is an outgrowth of the notion that human nature may be described in terms of the bad-active principle.

22. If human nature is intrinsically evil, then a strongly developed will is necessary to harness its inherent evil. Will, in the sense in which it is employed here, refers to ability to implement, or put into effective practice, a decision that has been made. A strongly developed will enables a person to "see a decision through" even though such action violates natural, that is, evil, impulses. Hence, if one chooses to emancipate oneself from one's innate natural impulses, a well-developed will is necessary for success; one must make oneself do what one does not want to do.

23. Faculty psychologists have held that if a person pursues any type of unpleasant work long enough, the person's will will be strengthened.

Under faculty psychology,

24. the task of a teacher is to find the kind of mental exercises that will train the various faculties most efficiently. Emphasis is not on acquiring knowledge but, rather, on strengthening mental faculties.

A consistent faculty psychologist would not be especially interested in teaching "great truths" or the "heritage of the past" or any other type of subject except insofar as it is a good medium for exercising the faculties of the mind

25. The special attention given by faculty psychology to development of the will has led to the notion that schoolwork is better for a child if it is somewhat distasteful.

Consequently, when faculty psychology is a dominant influence in a school, teachers may deliberately keep their assignments difficult and may use some force if necessary to ensure that students complete them.

HOW DID THE MENTAL DISCIPLINE THEORY OF LEARNING DEVELOP?

26. Mental discipline has roots extending into antiquity. Yet its manifestations continue to be quite evident in some present-day school practices.

In the fourth century B.C. Plato taught that mental training or discipline in mathematics and philosophy was a person's best preparation for participation in the conduct of public affairs. Once trained, by having one's mind developed, a person was ready to solve problems of all kinds.

Aristotle, who followed Plato, described at least five different faculties; the greatest, and the one unique to human beings, was reason. Faculties that humans had in common with lower animals were the vegetative, appetitive, sensory, and locomotive, but only human beings could reason.

Emergence of Classical Humanism

27. At the close of the Middle Ages, during the Renaissance, classical humanism emerged as an endeavor of people to gain more understanding of the universe and themselves.

Classical humanists believed

that human beings, rather than the Scriptures, were to be the starting point in satisfying humanity's urge toward individual development.

To gain understanding of the ideal nature of human beings, humanistic scholars turned to the classics of ancient Greece and Rome.

The resulting classical humanism of the Renaissance was developed on the assumption that

a person was a neutral-active rational animal whose direction of growth was to be provided from within, not by yielding to the behest of every chance impulse, but by following principles that an individual formulated for guidance of one's conduct.

28. Thus, learning was regarded as a process of firm self-discipline, consisting of harmonious development of all of a person's inherent powers so that no one faculty was overdeveloped at the expense of others.

14. Within classical humanism, the Socratic method was popular as a teaching procedure. A teacher's function was to help students recognize what already was in their minds; environmental influence was considered of little consequence.

29. The Socratic method implies that the teacher has no knowledge, or at least professes to impart no information; instead, he seeks to draw the information from his students by means of skillfully directed questions. The method is predicated on the principle that knowledge is inborn but we cannot recall it without expert help.

Nineteenth-Century Mental Discipline

30.. The nineteenth century could be characterized as the century of mental discipline. Rooted in European traditions of idealistic and rationalistic philosophy, precepts of mental discipline had some currency in the early part of the century and gained great popularity in the middle and later decades.

31. During this period, education was regarded as necessarily laborious. Schoolroom atmospheres were at least austere and sometimes harsh. Teachers usually were dictators, sometimes benevolent, but sometimes even spiteful. ·Children were expected to be respectful and obedient and to accept at face value whatever teachers told them.

·32. Curriculums were relatively fixed with an almost exclusive emphasis in elementary schools on the fundamental skill subjects and, in secondary schools, on such "disciplinary" subjects as Latin, history, and mathematics.

Reassertion of Classical Humanism in the Twentieth Century

18. Traditionally, classical humanists have been more interested in perfecting the minds of a few superior individuals than in elevating the intelligence of humankind as a whole.

33. Accordingly, some twentieth-century classical humanists have been attempting to repudiate the intellectual leadership of natural and social scientists in the affairs of life and to revert to the precepts of traditional philosophers as represented by Plato, Aristotle, and the medieval scholastics. Whereas scientists make great use of other symbols, classical humanistic literary intellectuals center their activity in words.

34.Some leading twentieth-century classical humanists are Mortimer J. Adler (1902-), Allan Bloom (1930-1992), Robert M. Hutchins (1899-1977) and Mark Van Doren (189~1972). Adler's Paideia principles include the following:

"That the primary cause of genuine learning is the activity of the learner's own mind, sometimes with the help of a teacher functioning as a secondary and cooperative cause; [and] that the three kinds of teaching that should occur in our schools are didactic teaching of subject matter, coaching that produces the skills of learning, and Socratic questioning in seminar discussions."4 But, "of the three educational objectives-acquisition of knowledge, development of intellectual skills, and increase of understanding of basic ideas and issues-the third is by far the most important, and cannot be achieved without seminar discussions of truly great or almost great books."5

35. In his The Closing of the American Mind, Bloom states, "Men may live more truly and fully in reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time, because then they are participating in essential being and forgetting their accidental lives."6

36. For Bloom, Plato's Republic is "the book on education because it really explains to me what I experience as a man and a teacher."7

The two most influential groups in the United States who continue to favor a mental-disciplinary approach to education are some leaders in parochial education and those liberal arts professors who are under the influence of faculty psychology and the classical tradition. In addition to these there are many thousands of other persons, including some schoolteachers, who gravitate toward a theory of mental discipline.

The Wedding of Classicism and Faculty Psychology

37. Faculty psychology, as developed by Wolff and his followers, was at first a challenge to classical humanism. Logically, faculty psychologists should consider one subject as good as another for exercising a particular faculty. Also, knowledge retained by a student was considered much less important than the disciplining effect of learning it. But these conclusions negate the classicist's insistence on the virtues of certain subjects and on learning and retaining the great truths that human experience has unveiled.

38. However, a rather easy compromise between classicism and faculty psychology soon became apparent. If it could be established that the best subjects for training the faculties were the classics, then the classical curriculum could be defended. This argument gained strength, and by the late nineteenth century most secondary schools and colleges offered a curriculum limited mainly to the classical liberal arts. These subjects were regarded as valuable for a twofold reason: They were excellent tools for mind training, and they incorporated the great truths of human experience.

An Historical Example of Mental Discipline

39. A brief history of the teaching of Latin and Greek illustrates the development of mental discipline as a theory of reaming. Throughout the Middle Ages, Latin served a practical purpose. It was the language of scholars throughout the Westem world and the vehicle of instruction in schools. Thus, it was a living, growing, changing language that today we would call a "tool subject." During the Renaissance, Latin continued to be the language of scholarly communication, and both Latin and Greek were used in reading the classics, which contained those ideas considered the best that had been thought by humanity. To keep up with the thinking of his times, a scholar had to be able to read and use both Latin and Greek.

40. After the Renaissance, modern languages gradually came into more general use. English, German, and French rose to prominence and assumed the role previously played by Latin and Greek. By the end of the sixteenth century the communicative value of the classical languages was beginning to wane. Supporters of these languages, however, made a determined fight to preserve them. No longer needed for basic communication, Latin and Greek came to be heralded as the best subject matter for mental discipline. Throughout most of the nineteenth century the doctrine of the disciplinary value of these languages was generally accepted in American educational circles. Since, according to the classical humanists, disciplinary values were intangible and not susceptible to statistical treatment, evaluation of them was limited to analysis of opinions of recognized authorities on educational matters.

41. During the early years of the twentieth century, when the mechanistic learning theories that were opposed to mental discipline-apperception, connectionism, and behaviorism-were on the upsurge in educational circles, Greek practically dropped out of the educational picture and Latin suffered a great decline. However, by the middle of the twentieth century, a resurgence of the classical tradition was apparent. With it came its earlier associate, mental discipline, and the teaching of Latin began to be expanded again. Then, more recently, with the emphasis upon narrow vocationalism in schools, classical studies, including Latin, have dropped into the background once more.