gress
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.

The science of psychology, and whatever science of general pedagogics
may be based on it, are in fact much like the science of war. Nothing is
simpler or more definite than the principles of either. In war, all you
have to do is to work your enemy into a position from which the natural
obstacles prevent him from escaping if he tries to; then to fall on him
in numbers superior to his own, at a moment when you have led him to
think you far away; and so, with a minimum of exposure of your own
troops, to hack his force to pieces, and take the remainder prisoners.
Just so, in teaching, you must simply work your pupil into such a state
of interest in what you are going to teach him that every other object
of attention is banished from his mind; then reveal it to him so
impressively that he will remember the occasion to his dying day; and
finally fill him with devouring curiosity to know what the next steps in
connection with the subject are. The principles being so plain, there
would be nothing but victories for the masters of the science, either on
the battlefield or in the schoolroom, if they did not both have to make
their application to an incalculable quantity in the shape of the mind
of their opponent. The mind of your own enemy, the pupil, is working
away from you as keenly and eagerly as is the mind of the commander on
the other side from the scientific gen