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Question of the Day: AP English Language
Passage adapted from “Psychology and the Teaching Art” (1899) by William James
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 positively do 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.
The art of teaching grew up in the schoolroom, out of inventiveness and sympathetic concrete observation. Even where (as in the case of Herbart) the advancer of the art was also a psychologist, the pedagogics and the psychology ran side by side, and the former was not derived in any sense from the latter. The two were congruent, but neither was subordinate. And so everywhere the teaching must agree with the psychology, but need not necessarily be the only kind of teaching that would so agree; for many diverse methods of teaching may equally well agree with psychological laws.
To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To advance to that result, we must have an additional endowment altogether, a happy tact and ingenuity to tell us what definite things to say and do when the pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting and pursuing the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, though they are the alpha and omega of the teacher's art, are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least.
What does James mean by saying that teaching is an art?
The word is meant to express the human values of teaching in contrast to the cold, calculating nature of science.
The word is chosen to make the reader feel that teaching is a beautiful thing.
It is best taught in studios and not in the classroom or laboratory.
It is an applied discipline that is not merely theoretical.
This is being used by him to show how teaching requires knowledge of many other subjects than psychology.
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The AP English Language Question of the Day gives you the opportunity to receive a question each day that’s similar in format to your upcoming AP English Language test. It’s just one of many review resources available from Varsity Tutors’ Learning Tools, all of which can help you as you move forward toward the test.
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