2. They are dependent upon one another for their worth
In the second place, facts can by no means be regarded as independent. As before, to be sure, the three R's and spelling afford some exception to this rule. In spelling, writing, and beginning reading it is important that any one of a large number of words be recognized or reproduced at any time, without reference to any others. All of these, together with the combinations in the fundamental operations in arithmetic, are often called for singly, and they must, therefore, be isolated from any possible series into which they might fall, and mastered separately.
Aside from these subjects, facts are generally dependent upon their relations to one another for their value. Taken alone, they are ineffective fragments of knowledge, just as a common soldier or an officer in an army is ineffective in battle without definite relations to a multitude of other men.
If the first sentences on twenty successive pages in a book were brought together, they would tell no story. They would be mere scattered fractions of thoughts, lacking that relation to one another that would give them significance and make them a unit. Twenty closely related sentences might, however, express a very valuable thought.
James Anthony Froude, impressed with this truth and at the same time recalling the prevalent tendency to ignore it, declares: "Detached facts on miscellaneous subjects, as they are taught at a modern school, are like separate letters of endless alphabets. You may load the mechanical memory with them, till it becomes a marvel of retentiveness. Your young prodigy may amaze examiners and delight inspectors. His achievements may be emblazoned in blue books, and furnish matter for flattering reports on the excellence of our educational system. And all this while you have been feeding him with chips of granite. But arrange your letters into words, and each word becomes a thought, a symbol waking in the mind an image of a real thing. Group your words into sentences, and thought is married to thought, and the chips of granite become soft bread, wholesome, nutritious, and invigorating." [Footnote: James Anthony Froude, Handwork before Headwork.]
A very simple illustration is found in the study of the dates for the entrance of our states into the Union. Taken one at a time, the list is dead. But interest is awakened the moment one discovers that for a long period each Northern state was matched by one in the South, so that they entered in pairs.
3. The sum of the details does not equal the whole.
Finally, the whole of a subject is not merely the sum of its little facts. You may study each day's history lesson faithfully, and may retain everything in memory till the book is "finished," and still not know the main things in the book. You may understand and memorize each verse of a chapter in the Bible until you can almost reproduce the chapter in your sleep, and still fail to know what the chapter is about. Probably some readers of this text who have repeated the Lord's Prayer from infancy, would still need to do some studying before they could tell the two or three leading thoughts in that prayer.
An especially good illustration of this fact in my own experience as a teacher has been furnished in connection with the following paragraph, taken from Dr. John Dewey's Ethical Principles underlying Education. "Information is genuine or educative only in so far as it effects definite images and conceptions of material placed in social life. Discipline is genuine and educative only as it represents a reaction of the information into the individual's own powers, so that he can bring them under control for social ends. Culture, if it is to be genuine and educative, and not an external polish or factitious varnish, represents the vital union of information and discipline. It designates the socialization of the individual in his whole outlook upon life and mode of dealing with it." I have had a large number of graduate students who found it very difficult to state the point of this paragraph, although every sentence is reasonably clear and they are in close sequence.
Thus the larger thoughts, instead of being the sum of the details, are an outgrowth from them, an interpretation of them; they are separate and new ideas conceived through insight into the relations that the individual statements bear to one another.