Thinking and learning to think by Nathan C. Schaeffer (ebooks that read to you .txt) đź“–
- Author: Nathan C. Schaeffer
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Hear a parable. A teacher sat down to dinner. The waiter handed him the bill of fare. The proprietor followed the waiter to the kitchen, directed him to cut out the names of the eatables which had been ordered, and to carry these names on plates to the dining-room. “It is not these words,” exclaimed the guest, “that I desire to eat, but the things in the kitchen for which these words stand.” “Isn’t that what you pedagogues are doing all the time, expecting children to make an intellectual meal on words such as are found in the columns of the spelling-book and attached on maps to the black dots which you call cities? My boy gravely informs me that every State capital has its ring, because on his map there is always a ring around the dot called the capital of a country.” The teacher was forced to admit that there is, alas! too much truth in the allegation. In the afternoon he took revenge. Knowing that the proprietor had a thousand-dollar draft to be cashed, he arranged with the banker to have it paid in silver coin. When the landlord saw the growing heap of coin, he exclaimed, “If I must be paid in silver, can you not give me silver certificates?” “Did you not intimate to me,” said the teacher, tapping him on the shoulder, “that it is the real things we want, and not words and symbols which stand for realities?” The landlord was obliged to admit that in the larger transactions of the mercantile world it saves time and is far more convenient to use checks, drafts, and other symbols for money than it would be to use the actual cash. In elementary transactions, like the purchase of a necktie, it is better to use the cash, to think and deal in real money, but when it comes to the distribution of five and one-half million dollars among the school districts of Pennsylvania, it is better to draw warrants upon the State Treasurer, to use checks and drafts, and to think in figures, than it would be to count so much coin, and send the appropriation in that form all over a great commonwealth.
The parable hardly needs an interpretation. Its lesson points in two directions. On the one hand, it shows in the true light every species of rote teaching, of parrot-like repetition of definitions, statements, and lists of words which give a show of knowledge without the substance. It puts the seal of condemnation on most forms of pure memory work. It sounds the note of warning to all teachers who are trying to improve the memory by concert recitations. The boy whose class was taught to define a point as position without length, breadth, or thickness, and who, when asked to recite alone, gave the definition, “A point has a physician without strength, health, or sickness,” is but one of many specimens of class-teaching condemned by the parable. It says in unmistakable terms that all elementary instruction must start in the concrete, taking up the objects or things to be known, and resolutely refusing to begin with statements and definitions which to the children are a mere jargon of words.
On the other hand, the parable indicates how too long-continued use of the concrete may arrest development, and hinder the learner from reaching the stages of advanced thinking. It hints that the too constant use of blocks, however valuable at first, ultimately begets blockheads, instead of intelligences capable of the higher life of thought and reflection. A rational system of pedagogy involves proper attention to the materials of thought and proper care in furnishing the instruments by which advanced thinking is made easy and effective. In one respect the parable does not set forth the whole truth. It makes no account of differences in thinking due to heredity and mental training. The differences in native ability are, however, not as great as is generally supposed (unless the feeble-minded enter into the comparison); the differences due to correct training, or the neglect of it, are far more striking. The work expected of the pupil should, of course, tally with his capacity; otherwise it will force him to resort to pernicious helps, beget in him wrong habits of study, rob him of the sense of mastery and the joy of intellectual achievement, and destroy his self-reliance, his power of initiative, and his ability to grapple with difficult problems and perplexing questions. The power to think grows by judicious exercise. Here better than anywhere else in the whole domain of school work can we distinguish the genuine coin from its counterfeit, and discriminate between true skill and quackery, between the artist and the artisan. It is at this point that most help can be given to young teachers by a good course of lectures on learning to think and on the difficult art of stimulating others to think.
IIITHE MATERIALS OF THOUGHT
A vast abundance of objects must lie before us ere we can think upon them.
Goethe.
The young have a strong appetite for reality, and the teacher who does not make use of that appetite is not wise.
J. S. Blackie.
The child’s restless observation, instead of being ignored or checked, should be diligently ministered to, and made as accurate as possible.
Herbert Spencer.
You have an exchequer of words, and I think no other treasure.
Two Gentlemen of Verona.
IIITHE MATERIALS OF THOUGHT
The hotel man was right in his criticism of teachers who expect their pupils to make an intellectual meal on mere words. For three hundred years educational reformers have been hurling their epithets against this abuse. Has it been banished from the schools? By no means. It crops out anew with every generation of teachers and in every grade of instruction from the kindergarten to the university. During the years in which a child acquires several languages without difficulty, if it hears them spoken, the mind is eager for words and often appropriates them regardless of their meaning. The child learns rhymes and phrases for the sake of the jingle that is in them, and cares very little for clearly defined ideas and thoughts. So strong and retentive is the memory for words that the child finds it easier to learn by heart entire sentences than to think the thoughts therein expressed. Like a willing and obedient slave, the verbal memory can be made to do the work of the other mental powers. The merest glimpse at a picture may recall all the sentences on the same page, so that the pupil can repeat them with the book closed or the back turned towards the reading chart. The recollection of what the ear has heard may thus relieve the eye of its function in seeing words, degrade the child to the level of a parrot, and thereby greatly hinder progress in learning to read. Very frequently the memory is required to perform work belonging to the reflective powers, because the learner is thereby saved the trouble of comprehending the lesson and expressing its substance in his own language. Moreover, the accurate statement of a truth is apt to be accepted as evidence of knowledge and correct thinking. The average examination tests very little more than the memory. If the answers are given in the language of the text-book or the teacher, the examiner seldom supplements the written work by an oral examination. Thus there is a constant tendency on the part of teachers and pupils to rest satisfied with correct forms of statement; and the pernicious custom of feeding the mind on mere words is encouraged and perpetuated. Exposed in plain terms, this abuse of words is condemned by everybody; yet it is as easy at this point to slide into the wrong practice as it is to fall into the sins forbidden by the decalogue. Like Proteus, this abuse assumes diverse and unexpected forms; instance after instance is needed to put young teachers on their guard and to expose its pernicious effect upon methods of instruction and habits of study. To cry “words, words, nothing but words,” will not suffice to correct the evil, for words must be used in the best kind of instruction. Line upon line, precept upon precept, example after example is needed to expose the folly of learning words without corresponding ideas, of teaching symbols apart from the things for which they stand. No apology is needed for citing laughable and flagrant instances in point; ridicule sometimes avails where good counsel fails.
A superintendent who advocates spelling-bees and magnifies correct orthography out of all proportion to its real value startled a class in the high school by asking for the spelling of a word of five syllables. Not receiving an immediate answer, he referred to the Greek. This made the spelling easy for at least one pupil. A year later he accosted this pupil, saying, “You are the only person that ever spelled psychopannychism for me.” “What does it mean?” was the question flashed back at him in return for his compliment. He could not tell, because he did not know. For years he had worried teachers and pupils with the spelling of a word whose meaning he had failed to fix accurately in his own mind.[2] What more effective method could be devised for destroying correct habits of thinking?
There is a time in the life of the child when it is hungry for new words. The habit of seeing words accurately and learning their spelling at first sight is then easily acquired, provided there is no defect in the pupil’s eyes. In cases of defective eyesight the first step towards the solution of the spelling problem, as well as the first condition in teaching the pupil to think accurately, is to send him to a skilled oculist (not to a so-called graduate optician or doctor of refraction, who must make his living out of the spectacles he sells, and whose limited training does not enable him to make a correct diagnosis in critical cases). Correct vision will assist the pupil not merely in learning the exact form of the words which he uses in writing, but also in forming correct ideas of the things with which the mind deals in the thought-processes. Although great stress should be laid upon the orthography of such words in common use as are frequently misspelled,—daily drill upon lists of these should not be omitted at school while the child’s word-hunger lasts,—yet it is vastly more important to acquire an adequate knowledge of the ideas, concepts, and relations for which the words stand. To spend time upon the spelling of words which only the specialist uses, and which are easily learned in connection with the specialty by a student possessing correct mental habits, is a form of waste that cannot be too severely condemned. It is far better to spend time in building concepts of things met with in real life.
The meaning of very many words is, of course, learned from the connection in which they occur. This, however, is not true of sesquipedalian words like the one mentioned above, nor of the technical terms by which science designates the things that have been accurately defined or quantified.
Technical terms are used to denote the ideas which lie at the basis of science. These fundamental ideas are appropriately called basal concepts. Since basal concepts cannot be transferred from the teacher’s mind to the pupils’ minds by merely teaching the corresponding technical terms, they must be developed by appropriate lessons. If
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