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

From this point of view one can see a wide field for the intelligent application of the maxim to our efforts at learning to write, to talk, to walk, to play on a musical instrument, or to handle the tools of some handicraft. If questioned with reference to these and kindred activities, the physiologist would answer that the repeated action of the nerves and muscles in specific functions fits them the better to act in the same functions, and that the effect of the exercise of any function may be stored up so as to increase the facility of the nervous structure to exercise again every similar function. The psychologist would say that any normal act performed under the guidance of an intelligent will leaves, as its enduring result, an increased power to act and a tendency to act again in like manner. Common parlance, which is apt to enshrine its wisdom in proverbs, simply says, Practice makes perfect. Doing, when it engrosses the attention, exerts a reflex influence upon thinking; after it sinks to the subconscious level it ceases to exert a helpful influence. The methods adopted in our manual-training schools are, in this respect, much superior to those pursued under the old apprentice system. The master mechanic found it to his interest to keep the apprentice upon one kind of work until a high degree of skill was attained. He used the apprentice as a means to an end,—the end being the production of things that would sell and thus reimburse the master for the time and trouble of teaching his trade to another. The mysteries of the trade were kept to the last for fear the apprentice would quit before the expiration of the time for which he was indentured. No better plan for crushing the intellectual life could have been conceived. The manual-training school, on the other hand, makes the boy, and not the product, the end of its training, the object of chief concern. It seeks not merely to make the man a better workman, but the workman a better man. No pupil is asked to go through the same movement, to do the same piece of work, for the purpose of developing skill, until every trace of interest is gone. Nothing is made for the purpose of selling; everything prescribed is for the purpose of developing the pupil’s powers, to enable him to express thought by the use of working-tools and instruments. The working-drawing and the model are the symbols which come nearest to a full representation of the thing to be made. The word, the clay, the stone, the metal, the leather, the cloth, are the materials in which thought finds its final expression. Nothing is carried so far as to deaden the boy’s interest in what he is doing; the charm of novelty is kept up from day to day. If the first product is defective, a new problem is set, involving the same fundamental operations, or the use of the same tools and instruments. The manual-training school and the trade school, if properly conducted, thus become a most valuable means for developing the power to think in things. It aims to create the power to think, as well as the power to do; the two are made commensurate and mutually helpful. The thinking is made to issue in doing, and the doing is kept from sinking into the subconscious stage, where it tends to degrade the individual to the mere level of a machine. Within these limitations we can endorse Professor Wilson’s tribute to the hand, and subscribe to his demand that, as in the days of Israel’s glory, it shall be trained in some useful handicraft, not merely as a means of livelihood, but more especially as a means of making the pupil a better thinker, a completer man.