Training the Teacher

by A. F. Schauffler; Martin Grove Brumbaugh; Antoinette Abernethy Lamoreaux; Marion Lawrance

What Teaching Is

34. Teaching Defined.—The Sunday-school teacher as much as any other teacher should understand clearly what teaching is. Teaching is not telling, and no amount of talking to the pupil can be considered as teaching. Teaching is not determined by anything that happens outside the pupil, but by the action of the pupil's soul upon the things that are presented to it through the senses. Teaching may be defined as causing a human soul to know.

35. Everything outside the learner may be considered his teacher. We are taught in the broadest sense by the spirit of God's universe expressed in terms of order and law. We are taught in a more restricted sense by our immediate environment, and especially by the people whose lives come in close contact with our own. In the most restricted sense we are taught by a trained mind, and this trained mind belongs to a person called a teacher. The process of teaching may be considered as the act of bringing into the consciousness of the learner the knowledge already in the consciousness of the teacher. We cannot teach what we do not know. Teaching ends when the pupil knows all that the teacher knows.

36. Impression and Expression.—When I say that I know a certain thing, I mean that my soul possesses that thing and knows that it possesses it; this is consciousness. The teaching act completes itself when the learner is able to express in language or otherwise to the satisfaction of the teacher the facts in consciousness. In other words, the soul is not fully educated until it has reached the point of expression.

37. It will be seen from this that teaching is possible only when the soul is actively seeking new knowledge. This attempt of the soul to seek new knowledge causes it, for one reason or another, to focus itself upon some one object of thought to the exclusion of all other objects of thought. This act is called attention. When the will directs the attention it is called voluntary attention. When some other agency than the will directs the attention it is called involuntary attention.

38. Securing Attention.—The greatest art in teaching is to secure attention. The highest form of attention is voluntary attention. The young child does not possess sufficient will-power to control attention; consequently in the early grades some other agent than a command of the will must hold attention. This other agent in a general way may be characterized as interest. In other words, the young child's interests hold his attention, and the thing in which he takes the greatest interest will easiest attract his attention.

39. There are certain well-known principles underlying the interest of the child. First, his curiosity; second, novelty, or unexpectedness; third, imitativeness; fourth, illustrations based upon his experience. The teacher cannot be too careful to consider what is of interest to a child. We cannot measure the interests of a child by the interests of an adult. Here the study of child nature is the only safe and adequate guidance.

40. How Knowledge Reaches the Soul.—There are but five gateways to the soul of a child, called the senses:—Seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, smelling. There are no other channels of approach. Whatever increases the breadth of this sense-approach in a subject of study increases the interest of the learner in that subject. If I tell a child about a ball, I utilize his sense of hearing; if I show him a ball, at the same time I describe it, I utilize seeing and hearing; if I hand him a ball, as I describe it, I utilize touching, seeing, and hearing. A single fact reaching consciousness through the senses and recognized in consciousness is called a percept or a particular notion. It is sometimes called an idea. The soul in giving expression to an idea uses a word or some other sign for the idea. Thus words are the signs of ideas.

41. When other facts of a similar character reach consciousness, and are identified there with the first percept, the percept becomes a concept, general notion or general idea, just as the percept is an individual idea; that is, the percept stands for one object apprehended in consciousness; the concept stands for a group of similar objects under one name apprehended in consciousness. All the common nouns are concepts just as all proper nouns are percepts. For example, in the sentence, "Washington was a brave man," it is plain that "Washington" is a particular idea or percept and "man" is a general idea or concept.

42. Judgment and Reasoning.—The aim of the teacher is, first, to secure clear percepts, and then rapidly to change these percepts into concepts, which is only another way of saying that good teaching relates the things in the soul in such a way as to give the child the fewest possible terms with which to carry the largest possible number of particular facts. Concepts are the shorthand of the soul's language. When these concepts are compared and their agreement or disagreement noted the soul is forming judgments. When these judgments are expressed in language the soul is forming sentences. When these judgments are compared and their agreement or disagreement noted, the soul is reasoning. Sentences are the signs of judgments or reasons, just as words are the signs of percepts or concepts. Thus the percept first comes; the percept grows into the concept; the concept into the judgment; the judgment into reasoning; and these are the four steps in the process of knowing. They are the tools of thought. Teaching must be a training in the use of these tools.

43. Memory is of little use unless it is simply the power to hold things clearly understood by the soul. It is not good teaching to burden the memory with masses of things not clearly perceived and conceived, although it may be at the beginning not at all objectionable to commit to memory certain great utterances from the Bible and other standard literature, even when the meaning is not clearly and fully apprehended. But at the earliest time possible these should be analyzed and the meaning worked into forms of clear knowledge.

44. Imagination.—Imagination is the power of the soul to work up into new combinations the things in memory. Memory keeps things as the soul got them through the senses. The products of memory have a basis in experience. The products of imagination have no such basis in experience. Imagination is the creator of new products. It cares not for facts, but works after its own fancy. It is a more dangerous power because more free. To curb it at the outset is necessary. To allow it free range is to open the way for statements from the child that often alarm the parent or teacher. But when once the moral sense is awakened and governs imagination the latter becomes the agency that creates all art and enriches all life.

45. Teaching aims to develop by appropriate exercise all these powers of the soul. What the pupil learns is not so important as what power he gains in the control and use of his thinking processes under the guidance of a skilful teacher.