Thinking and learning to think by Nathan C. Schaeffer (ebooks that read to you .txt) 📖

PHILADELPHIA
J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY
1906

Copyright, 1900
by
J. B. Lippincott Company

ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED BY J. B. LIPPINCOTT COMPANY, PHILADELPHIA, U.S.A.

The progress of educational thought during the closing years of this century has been marvellous. Professional schools have created a demand for professional teaching by giving an increasing group of skilled instructors to our schools. This professional activity has caused our leading cities to provide training-schools, as integral parts of the city system of education. Finally, our great universities have established departments of pedagogy for the higher training in education. As a result, the leading positions in higher schools and in supervision are more and more demanding professionally trained leaders.

In this auspicious awakening for professional leadership there has come an increasing demand for standard treatises upon the fundamental problems of education. Treatises upon the history, methods, principles, and systems of education have appeared with astonishing frequency. That many of these are commercial treatises—made to sell—is doubtless true. There is always a great temptation to profit by an active demand. Well-disposed but not always widely trained and broadly cultured teachers, who have achieved a local success with a method that owed its virtue to the personality of its author and not to its intrinsic worth, have been tempted into authorship. The wiser and nobler minds in the profession wait. The days of unrest and experimentation, breeding discord and confusion, have in part passed away, and the time has come when the products of all this divergent activity may be put to the test of clear analysis and adequate experience. This is especially true in the domains of historic and philosophic inquiry. In experimental activity, touching the problems of psychic life as related to its sensorium, much has been done in a tentative way. Much must yet be done to produce results of enduring significance.

This series of educational treatises is projected to give inquiring minds the best thought of our present professional life. Fundamental problems in education will be exhibited in the series from time to time by thoroughly trained leaders of extended experience. Teachers may confidently accept these as authoritative discussions of the cardinal questions of their profession.

The highest endowment of the human spirit on the intellectual side is the power to think. Learning to think is an essential process and end in all school work. Thinking is the intellect’s regal activity. In a vague way, all teaching appeals to the thought-activity of the pupil; but vagueness in teaching is as pernicious as it is common. To exhibit the value, scope, and process of thought is of inestimable service to the teacher. It gives specific direction to teaching processes, and saves the child from a thousand fanciful expedients.

In the craze of the passing decade for novelty in teaching, there has resulted an undue emphasis upon forms of so-called expressional activity. It has been, in many quarters, forgotten that education is noblest when it produces reflective activity. The power to analyze and synthetize thought-complexes is the most fruitful endowment of the intellectual life. Expression without adequate reflection is productive of superficiality.

We have been living a life of educational expedients. The path of educational advance is strewn with countless cast-off practices which once claimed attention largely because of the feeling among too many that the newest theory is the best. There has come, let us hope, the more rational resolve to test all new and loudly heralded theories by fundamental laws of mental activity. To emphasize the significance of this reaction, and to afford helpful criteria of educational processes, this volume will be found most stimulating, suggestive, and sensible.

For the purposes of the teacher thinking may be distinguished as follows:

(a) Clear thinking, by which one is to understand thinking the thing, and not some other thing in its stead. Much thinking is not clear. The power of recall is not fully developed. The mind acts, but is not able to assert confidently the accuracy of what it acts upon. Much needless criticism is heaped upon schools because pupils cannot spell correctly, solve problems accurately, recite a lesson in history or in geography properly,—in short, because the pupil’s knowledge is not clear. The first step in all true teaching is the step that makes clear to the pupil the thing he is to think.

(b) Distinct thinking, by which one is to understand thinking the thing in its relations. This phase of thinking is sometimes called apperception. It is the second, and not the first step in thinking. There is no value in teaching relations until the things to be related are first clearly apprehended. Perception must precede apperception. The pupil in the elementary school has been well taught if he has been taught to think clearly and distinctly.

(c) Adequate thinking, by which one is to understand thinking the thing in its essential parts. This is the analytic form of thought. The child at first cannot think adequately. His mind thinks things as wholes. He has not the power to think the whole and its parts, as parts of the whole, simultaneously. He must rise to adequate thinking only after clear and distinct thinking have become habits of mind. The fuller phase of this activity, by which these analyzed parts are synthetically wrought into an organic unity, is the process of concept-making,—the essential prerequisite of all high orders of thought. This power every teacher should possess. It is his surplus of knowledge, the possession of which makes him easily master in the teaching process.

(d) Exhaustive thinking, by which one is to understand thinking the thing in its causes. This is the highest form of thinking the thing. It gives perspective to thought-processes, and eliminates all accidental and misleading elements from the categories of thought. To achieve this, one must specialize. The teaching of the future must be more and more intensive in scope. The day of the encyclopædist is gone. The teacher of to-morrow must be a teacher who knows one order of truth exhaustively, and who possesses the skill to incite in others a permanent enthusiasm for that order of truth. Scientific progress is conditioned by such teaching.

The author has brought to this discussion the matured convictions of broad training in American and European systems of schools, and a wide and successful experience in teaching pupils and directing systems of education. The discussion takes on the modest but stimulating style of the public speaker. The author has for many years been among our foremost lecturers upon education. The temper of the discussion is moderate and constructive. There will be found here no wild excess, no straining after fanciful effect, no advocacy of sensational and ephemeral methods; nor is there a trace of pessimistic and destructive criticism of the earnest teachers who are conscious of limitations and are reaching hopefully for help. On the contrary, the discussion is full of real sympathy, founded upon personal experience with teaching in all its phases, and abounds in stimulating suggestion.

M. G. B.

October 1, 1900.

For a number of years it has been the author’s duty as well as privilege to lecture at county institutes on the difficult art of teaching pupils to think. This led to the request that the lectures be thrown into permanent form for publication. The lecturer who never publishes has no pet theories to defend; he can change his views as often as he sees fit; yet, in spite of this advantage, he cannot always escape or ignore the art of printing. One who gives his thoughts to the public without the use of manuscript and under the limitations of extemporaneous speech, made necessary by the large audiences which gather at teachers’ institutes, especially in Pennsylvania, runs the risk of being misquoted and misunderstood; he pays the penalty of being reported in fragmentary if not distorted forms. This ultimately drives him, in justice to himself and others, to write out his theories on education and to give them to his coworkers in print.

Portions of these lectures were delivered at the annual meeting of the superintendents of New England, before the State teachers’ associations of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Florida, before the Connecticut Council of Education, before the summer schools held under the auspices of the Ohio State University and the University of Wisconsin, and at several of the meetings of the National Educational Association. The favorable hearing accorded on these occasions induces the hope that the lectures will be kindly received by many who teach outside of Pennsylvania, and by some who give instruction in our higher institutions of learning.

Although no one can hope, on so difficult a theme, to say much that will be entirely satisfactory to leading educators, surely no apology is needed from any one who, after spending his best years in educational work, attempts to contribute his mite towards the solution of any of the problems which confront the teacher.

It is assumed that there is a body of educational doctrine well established in the minds of teachers, and that on many school questions we have advanced beyond the border line of first discovery. Those who assert that our educational practice is radically wrong and in need of thorough reformation should hasten to clarify their own views and ideas, to substitute constructive for destructive criticism, and to give definite shape to their reforms; otherwise a whole generation will grow to maturity and the reformers themselves will pass away before any of their reforms will have been accomplished. To give teachers the feeling that what they are doing is all wrong, and to leave them without anything better in place of what is condemned, robs them of joy in their work, makes them victims of worry and neurasthenia, and unfits them for the care of children. It is hoped that these lectures will be found to suggest a better way whenever