James Chapter One - Psychology and the Teaching Art

This first chapter serves as James' introduction of psychology to teachers. He explains its impactful nature as he delineates its practical role as a science and thus posits that teachers may readily examine its precepts in order to extrapolate effective teaching practices in the classroom.

James claims he lives in a time where psychology is being characterized as a panacea for professional educators. Consider the following passage.

"Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. And yet I confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some of your expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these simple talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some disappointment at the net results. In other words, I am not sure that you may not be indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated. That would not be altogether astonishing, for we have been having something like a 'boom' in psychology in this country. Laboratories and professorships have been founded, and reviews established. The air has been full of rumors. The editors of educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of the day. Some of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate, and I am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert. `The new psychology' has thus become a term to conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have been plunged in an atmostphere of vague talk about our science, which to a great extent has been more mystifying than enlightening. Altogether it does seem as if there were a certain fatality of mystification laid upon the teachers of our day. The matter of their profession, compact enough in itself, has to be frothed up for them in journals and institutes, till its outlines often threaten to be lost in a kind of vast uncertainty. Where the disciples are not independent and critical-minded enough (and I think that, if you teachers in the earlier grades have any defect--the slightest touch of a defect in the world--it is that you are a mite too docile), we are pretty sure to miss accuracy and balance and measure in those who get a license to lay down the law from above.
Psychology is a science, a method of establishing rules, creating constraints whereas teaching is an art, one by which one master will succeed in one particular way and another yet some other way" (p.2).

To me, the fundamental and powerful concept here is that no one knows everything or may claim that one field of study may reign over another area. Education is a multifaceted field in which there is more involved and more at stake than the simple process of  transmitting information from one who has knowledge to one who is to receive such knowledge. Even within a training environment, something of which I have some knowledge, I have to know more than just the subject matter and how to get it across. Having understanding of issues related to motivation, organizational culture and prerequisite learner skills are crucial in developing a successful training program. The nature and culture of education (to borrow a phrase from Jerome Bruner) incorporates psychological tenets, but it by no means should be completely defined by them.

Yet psychology serves a purpose and understanding some key aspects of psychology as it applies to education is vital. James goes on to explain that psychology as a science will never completely describe a complete and foolproof way of delivering instruction; there are precepts and accepted rules which may serve to constrain and convey a set of best practices. However, these practices, so long as they fall within the boundaries of these principles are not to be codified in a permanent sense.

"I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programmes and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality.
The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criticise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but what particular thing he shall do poitively within those lines is left exclusively to his own genius. One genius will do his work well and succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently; yet neither will transgress the lines" (p.3).

This brings me to my question: How would you define pedagogy relative to the role of psychology? At what level (if at all) do teachers consider the mind and direct mental processes as they plan instruction?