I’ve been thinking about brain research and teaching again, specifically in the light of an article about the seductive allure of neuroscience. I’d felt at a bit of a dead-end. My gut feeling was that there was a lot to learn from cognitive science, but I was (and am) very aware that I’m a very poor layman when it comes to assessing its value.
So I was chuffed to learn that William James had sorted it out for me a long time ago. He comments 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 school-room use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediate inventive mind must make that application, by using its originality.
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. … To know psychology, therefore, is absolutely no guarantee that we shall be good teachers. To advance 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 that pupil is before us. That ingenuity in meeting … the pupil, that tact for the concrete situation, . . . are things to which psychology cannot help us in the least. [My emphasis]
As David Berliner says,
“James did, however, see the study of psychology as useful in three ways: to provide the underpinnings for beliefs about instruction, to prohibit teachers from making certain egregious errors, and to provide intellectual support to teachers for some of their pedagogical decisions.”
Bingo.