Part 2 (2/2)
The technique of this latter process will be discussed more specifically in the next chapter.
Whether acquired by trial and error, or through reflection, learned acts are, the first time they are performed, frequently imperfect, only partly effective, and performed with some difficulty. With successive repet.i.tions their performance becomes more rapid, more immediate, and more adjusted to the specific situation to be met. And as they become more familiar responses to familiar stimuli they cease to be conscious at all. They are performed with almost as little difficulty or attention as normal breathing.
SOME CONDITIONS OF HABIT-FORMATION. The acquisition of habits is so important in the education of human beings that the conditions under which they can be acquired and made permanently effective have been closely studied. From experiments certain fundamental conclusions stand out. A habit is acquired by repet.i.tion, and the ”curves of learning”
show certain recurrent features. In the first few repet.i.tions of an acquired activity, there is progress in the rapidity, effectiveness, and accuracy with which the response is made.
There is, up to a certain point, an almost vertical rise in the learning curve. After varying numbers of repet.i.tions, depending somewhat on the particular individual, there occur what are known as ”plateaux,” during which no progress in speed or accuracy of response is to be observed. In experiments with the learning of typewriting, for example, it has been found that the beginner makes rapid progress up to the point, say, where he can write fifty words a minute without error; there is a long interval not infrequently before he can raise his efficiency to the point of writing seventy words a minute correctly. a.n.a.logous conditions have been observed in the speed with which the sending and receiving of telegraphic messages is learned. These ”plateaux” of learning are sometimes to be accounted for by muscular fatigue.
Frequently there is actual progress in learning during these apparent intervals of marking time. Some of the less observable features of skill in performance which only later become overt in speed and accuracy are being attained during these seemingly profitless and discouraging intervals. Not infrequently in the acquisition of skill in the playing of tennis or the piano, or in the solution of mathematical problems, a decided gain in skill and speed comes after what seems to be not only lack of progress but decided backsliding.[1] It is this which led William James to quote with approval the aphorism that one learns to skate in summer and swim in winter.
DRILL _VERSUS_ ATTENTIVE REPEt.i.tION IN LEARNING. The rapidity with which habits may be acquired and the permanency with which they may be retained depend on other factors than simply that of repet.i.tion. Mere mechanical drill is effective in the acquisition of simple mechanical habits. The most attentive appreciation of the proper things to be done in playing tennis or the piano will not by itself make one an expert in those activities. The effective responses must actually be performed in order that the appropriate connections within the nervous system may be made, and may become habitual.
A habit is physiologically nothing but a certain set or direction given to paths in the nervous system. These paths become fixed, embedded, and ingrained only when nerve currents pa.s.s over them time and time again.
[Footnote 1: See Ladd and Woodworth: _Physiological Psychology_, pp. 542-92.]
Mere repet.i.tion, on the other hand, will not suffice in the acquisition of complex habits of action. The learning of these requires a deliberate noting and appreciation of the significant factors in the performance of an activity, and the consciously chosen repet.i.tion of these in succeeding instances until the habit is well fixed. One reason why animals cannot be taught so wide a variety of complex habits as can the human being is that they cannot keep their attention fixed on successive repet.i.tions, and that in learning they literally do not know what they are doing. They cannot, as can humans, break up the activity which they are in process of learning into its significant factors, and attend to these in successive repet.i.tions. The superiority of deliberate learning over the brute method of trial and error consists precisely in that the deliberate and attentive learner can pick out the important steps of any process, and learn rapidly to eliminate random and useless features of his early performances without waiting to have the right way ”knocked into him” by experience.
He will short-circuit the process of learning by choosing appropriate responses in advance, noting how they may be made more effective and discovering methods for making them so, and for eliminating useless, random, and ineffective acts. What we call the ”capacity to learn” is evident in marked degree where there is alert attention to the steps of the process in successive repet.i.tions. The truth in the a.s.sertion that an intelligent man will shortly outcla.s.s the merely automatically skillful in any occupation or profession requiring training, lies not in any mysterious faculty, but in the peculiarly valuable habit of attending with discriminating interest to any process, and learning it thereby with vastly more economical rapidity. Genius may be more than what one writer described it, ”a painstaking attention to detail”; but a painstaking attention to the meaning and bearing of details it most decidedly is.
LEARNING AFFECTED BY AGE, FATIGUE, AND HEALTH. There are certain conditions not altogether within the control of the individual which affect the rapidity with which habits are acquired. One of the most important of these is fatigue.
Connections among the fibers that go to make up the nervous system cannot be made with ease and rapidity when the organism is fatigued. At such times there seems to be an unusually high resistance at the synapses or nerve junctions (where there is a lowering of resistance to the pa.s.sage of a nerve current when habits are easily formed). After a certain point of fatigue, whether in the acquisition of motor habits or the memorizing of information, in which the process is much the same, the rate of learning is much slower and the degree of accuracy much less. The length of time through which habits are retained when acquired during a state of fatigue is also much less than under a more healthy and resilient condition of the organism.
The point of fatigue varies among different individuals and in consequence the conditions of habit-formation vary. But some conditions remain constant. For instance, in experiments with memory tests (memory being a form of habit in the nervous system), material memorized in the morning seems to be most rapidly acquired and most permanently retained.
The age and health of the individual also are important factors in the capacity to learn, or habit-formation.
Conditions during disease are similar to those obtaining during fatigue, only to a more acute degree. The toxins and poisons in the nervous system at such times operate to prevent the formation of new habits and the breaking of old ones. For while the synapses (nerve junctions) may offer high resistance to the pa.s.sage of a new stimulus, they will lend themselves more and more readily to the pa.s.sage of stimuli by which they have already been traversed.
That the age of the individual should make a vast difference in the capacity to acquire new habits and to modify old ones is obvious from the physiology of habit already described.
When the brain and nervous system are both young, there are few neural connections established, and the organism is plastic to all stimuli. As the individual grows older, connections once made tend to be repeated and to be, as it were, unconsciously preferred by the nervous system. The capacity to form habits is most p.r.o.nounced in the young child in whose nervous structure no one action rather than another has yet had a chance to be ingrained. The more connections that are made, the more habits that are acquired, the less, in a sense, can be made. For the organism will tend to repeat those actions to which it has previously been stimulated, and the more frequently it repeats them the more frequently it will tend to. So that, as William James pointed out, by twenty-five we are almost literally bundles of habits. When the majority of acts of life have become routine and fixed, it is almost impossible to acquire new ways of acting, since the acquisition of new habits seriously interferes with the old, and old habits physiologically stay put.
HABIT AS A TIME-SAVER. This fact, that habits can be acquired most easily early in life, and that those early acquired become so fixed that they are almost inescapable, is of supreme importance to the individual and society. It is in one sense a great advantage; it is an enormous saver of time. In the famous words of James:[1]
The great thing, then, in all education, is to _make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy_. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and live at ease upon the interest of the fund. _For this we must make automatic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can_, and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvantageous to us, as we would guard against the plague. The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work.
There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my readers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.[1]
[Footnote 1: James: _Psychology_, vol. I, p. 122.]
The ideal of efficiency is the ideal of having the effective thing habitually done with as little effort and difficulty as possible. This in the case of human beings is, as James points out, attained when good habits are early acquired and when as large a proportion as possible of purely routine activity is made effortless and below the level of consciousness. To do as many things as possible without thinking is to free thinking for new situations. Our experiences would be very restricted indeed if we could not reduce a large portion of the things we do to the mechanics of habit. Walking, eating, these, though partly instinctive, were once problems requiring thought, effort, and attention. If we had to spend all our lives learning to dress and undress, to find our way about our own house or city, to spell and to p.r.o.nounce correctly, it is clear how little variety and diversity we should ever attain in our lives.
By the time we are twenty these fundamental habits are so firmly fixed in us that, for better or for worse, they are ours for life, and we are free to give our attention to other things.
Again in the words of James:
We all of us have a definite routine manner of performing certain daily offices connected with the toilet, with the opening and shutting of familiar cupboards, and the like. Our lower centers know the order of these movements, and show their knowledge by their ”surprise”
if the objects are altered so as to oblige the movement to be made in a different way. But our higher thought centers know hardly anything about the matter. Few men can tell off-hand which sock, shoe, or trousers-leg they put on first. They must first mentally rehea.r.s.e the act; and even that is often insufficient--the act must be _performed_. So of the questions, Which valve of my double door opens first? Which way does my door swing? etc. I cannot _tell_ the answer; yet my _hand_ never makes a mistake. No one can _describe_ the order in which he brushes his hair or teeth; yet it is likely that the order is a pretty fixed one in all of us.[1]
[Footnote 1: James: _loc. cit._, vol. I, p. 115.]
HABIT AS A STABILIZER OF ACTION. Habit not only thus saves time, but stabilizes action, and where the habits acquired are effective ones, this is invaluable. Habits of prompt performance of certain daily duties on the part of the individual are a distinct benefit both to him and to others, as certain customary efficient office practices, when they are really habitual, immensely facilitate the operation of a business. On a larger scale habit is ”society's most precious conservative agent.”
Individuals not only develop personal habits of dress, speech, etc., but become habituated to social inst.i.tutions, to certain occupations, to the prestige attaching to some types of action and the punishment correlated with others. Education in the broadest sense is simply the acquisition of those habits which adapt an individual to his social environment. It is the instrument society uses to hand down the habits of thinking, feeling, and action which characterize a civilization. Society is protected from murder, theft, and pillage by law and the police, but it is even better protected by the fact that living together peacefully and cooperatively is for most adults habitual. In a positive sense the multifarious occupations and professions of a great modern city are carried on from day to day in all their accustomed detail, not because the lawyers, the business men, the teachers, who practice them continuously reason them out, nor from continuous instinctive promptings. They are striking testimony to the influence of habit. As a recent English writer puts it:
The population of London would be starved in a week if the flywheel of habit were removed, if no signalman or clerk or policeman ever did anything which was not suggested by a first-hand impulse, or if no one were more honest or punctual or industrious than he was led to be by his conscious love, on that particular day, for his master or for his work, or by his religion, or by a conviction of danger from the criminal law.[1]
[Footnote 1: Graham Wallas: _Great Society_, p. 74.]
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