LECTURE III
THE FUNCTION OF THE TEACHER:
AS STIMULATING INTEREST
In all ordinary cases, the pupil is dependent largely upon the teacher, for the awakening of interest, not only in the subjects of the daily study, but in the whole process of education. The average human being is, as respects every kind of work, a lazy animal. The child, if healthy, enjoys activity, indeed; but it is such activity as is primarily pleasurable, whether it tends to desirable ends in the education of the individual and the race, or not. It is, of course, a matter with which the tact of the teacher is required to deal, to make pleasurable the activities which must be enlisted in the interests of the educational process. But this can never be done, at the starting points of the process, in any complete and thoroughly profitable way. Play may to a certain extent be made educative; but all the discipline of education can never be converted into play. Much of the process of education can be made to furnish the pleasure which comes from all normal, healthy, and properly controlled use of our "active powers," only by turning the love of play, merely as play, into the love of work as the
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