Module 2-1 -95Excerpts from Interest and Effort in Education2
Interest is active, objective and personal. We TAKE interest. To be interested in any matter is to be actively concerned with it. We say a man has many interests to care for. We talk about the range of a man's interests, his business interests, local interests, church interests, etc. We identify interests with concerns or affairs. Interest does not end simply in itself, as bare feelings may, but is embodied in an object of regard. Interest is personal; it signifies a direct concern; a recognition of something at stake, something whose outcome is important for the individual.
There are questions that teachers can ask to discover if the task is one that will enable the child to exert effort and interest. Is this person doing something too easy for him something which has not a sufficient element of resistance to arouse his energies, especially his energies of thinking? Or is the work assigned so difficult that he has not the resources required in order to cope with it so alien to his experience
and his acquired habits that he does not know where or how to take hold? Between these two questions lies the teacher's task how shall the activities of pupils be progressively complicated by the introduction of difficulties, and yet these difficulties be of a nature to stimulate instead of
dulling and merely discouraging?
Good teaching, in other words, is teaching that appeals to
established powers while it includes such NEW materials as will demand their redirection for a new end, this redirection requiring though intelligent effort.
Motivation related to interest some reason must be
found in the PERSON, apart from the arithmetic or the geography or the manual activity, that might be attached to the lesson material so as to give it a leverage, or moving force.
2
Adapted from John Dewey, Interest and Effort in Education (New York: Houghton Miffin Company, 1913).