Module 2-1 -96The clue we have followed in our discussion of interest is its connection with an activity engaging a person in a wholehearted way. Interest is not some one thing; it is a name for the fact that a course of action, an occupation, or pursuit absorbs the powers of an individual in a thorough-going way. But an activity cannot go on in a void. It requires material, subject-matter, conditions upon which to operate.
Types of Educative Interest
1. Physical Activity Bodily action in educative growth.
Learning through the senses freer utilization of play
and occupational activities.
2. Sensory-motor A higher form of activity involving
the sensory-motor apparatus of the body is found
when the control over external objects is achieved
by means of tools of some sort, or by the application of one material to another. (Painting, clay modeling,
singing, sewing, metal working, collection of materials
for study in science, management of apparatus.)
3. Intellectual Interest Instead of thinking things
out and discovering them for the sake of the
successful achievement of an activity, we institute the activity for the sake of finding out something.
Planning ahead, taking notice of what happens,
relating this to what is attempted, are parts of
all intelligent or purposive activities. When anyone
becomes interested in a problem as a problem and in
inquiry and learning for the sake of solving the problem, interest is distinctively intellectual.
4. Social Interest Interest in persons is a strong
special interest and also one which intertwines with
those already named. Children's activities are so bound
up with others, and what others do touches them so
deeply and in so many ways, that it is only at rare
moments, perhaps of a clash of wills, that a child draws a sharp line between other people's affairs
as definitely theirs and his own as exclusively his own. No doubt some of the repulsiveness of purely
abstract intellectual studies to many children is
simply the reflexes of the fact that the things the
facts and truths presented to them have been isolated