We
often speak of something taxing a person's patience, but we really mean
that it taxes a person's attention, for impatience is only the desire of
the mind to attend to something more interesting than that which for the
moment occupies it."
Boys must be helped to concentrate their attention on what they are
doing, for their minds are always wandering away from the subject in
hand. The world outside them is so full of attractive objects new and
interesting to them, that their attention runs away after each fresh
thing that comes under their eyes. A child is constantly told to
observe, and he takes pleasure in doing so; when he begins to reason he
must for the time stop observing and concentrate his mind on the subject
he is studying. This change is at first very difficult for him, and the
teacher must help him to take up the new attitude. Sometimes attention
wanders because the boy is tired, and then the teacher should try to put
the subject in a new way. The boy does not generally cease to pay
attention wilfully and deliberately, and the teacher must be patient
with the restlessness so natural to youth. Let him at least always be
sure that the want of attention is not the result of his own fault, of
his own way of teaching.
If the attention of the teachers and the boys is trained in this way,
the whole school life will become fuller and brighter, and there will be
no room for the many harmful thoughts which crowd into the uncontrolled
mind.
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