How to Study and Teaching How to Study

by Frank M. McMurry

The end to be attained in education is in full harmony with this idea. The object of education most emphasized in recent years is efficiency, which means power to accomplish. It presupposes a good degree of intelligence, the more the better, but it goes beyond that; for an efficient person is one who does things. Knowledge without the ability to apply or use it leaves one theoretical, which, is a term of reproach.

The various subjects of instruction recognize the necessity of use very plainly. Painting and music, for example, contain, each, a large body of theory. They also include an abundance of practice, a practice, too, that centers in the betterment of man's condition. Literature deals largely with ideals, presenting the theory of living. But this theory is valuable chiefly as a guide to conduct. The student of literature who professes admiration for its ideas without applying them to himself has derived only a small part of the benefit from it that he should. Literature is like religion in this respect. The latter emphasizes the worth of insight into divine truth and of faith in God; but both this insight and faith are to find their fruitage in conduct. "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this," says the apostle, "to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." [Footnote: James 1, 27.] Similarly, a study of philosophy that does not end in affecting our own philosophy of life, and thereby our conduct, has been unsuccessful, even though examinations have been successfully passed.

Pure science is knowledge that has been proved and properly organized; and it is highly desirable that specialists devote their lives to its further development. The main reason, however, is that its applications may finally be more abundant; and science used for the purpose of education must recognize the relation of such knowledge to man as one of its integral and prominent parts. So long as efficiency is the recognized purpose of education, there is little excuse for a young person's studying science apart from its applications, or pure science. There is some profit in it, but there is more profit in something better. That kind of study should be left to the specialist.

Much has been said in times past about art for art's sake, science for the sake of science, and knowledge for the sake of knowledge; but these are vague expressions that will excite little interest so long as the worth of a man is determined by what comes out of him, by the service he renders, rather than by what enters in. Other branches of knowledge used for educative purposes, therefore, resemble the useful arts in the recognition of their bearings on man, their actual use as the goal in their study.

Why the using of knowledge as an endpoint in study needs emphasis.

It might be unnecessary to emphasize this matter were it not that this conception of study has been reached only after long development and is still actively opposed. The old Greeks stood for a very different idea. To Plato, the use of the intellect for practical purposes was subordinate and almost disgraceful. The summation of existence was to be found in reflection, and the ambition of the educated man was to escape from the concrete world, in order to live in the world of abstract truth. Many of the monks of the Middle Ages resembled the ancient Greeks in this regard, desiring to separate themselves as completely as possible from society for the sake of the contemplation of spiritual matters. Reflection, contemplation, was thus not a means to an end but an end in itself, and the thinker or dreamer, rather than the efficient man, was the ideally educated person.

That goal is now condemned for its extreme selfishness; we want men and women as citizens who are glad to identify themselves with their fellow beings and ambitious for efficient service among them, not those who conscientiously ignore the world. Yet there are still plain tendencies in this direction, as is seen in the fact that an education that is liberal and cultural is often contrasted with one that is useful as being of a higher order. "That alone is liberal education," says Cardinal Newman, "which stands on its own pretensions, which is independent of sequel, expects no complement, refuses to be informed (as it is called) by any end or absorbed into any art, in order duly to present itself to our contemplation." [Footnote: Scope and Nature of University Education, p. 135.] Liberal education is something which "is desirable, though nothing come of it"; "worth possessing for what it is, and not merely for what it does." Art for art's sake, rather than art for man's sake, would thus represent the true spirit of a liberal college course, in the estimation of this author; the admission of service to mankind as a prominent purpose, particularly as its goal, would deprive it of its liberal character, and in the same degree expose it to condemnation.

That is strange doctrine indeed. Liberal is originally a term opposed to narrow and restricted, and a liberal education might properly be contrasted with the very narrow bread-and-butter kind that aims at the mastery of art without theory. But how the restriction caused by the presence of worthy specific purposes of a thousand kinds is inimical to the broadening effects of study and to its general value is difficult to comprehend. The hypothesis guiding a scientific investigation narrows the work only enough to give it point, and a well-chosen particular aim will have the same effect on any study.

Further than that, the consciousness in advance that any conclusions reached must be tested by actual conditions has only a good influence by nerving us to do our best; and the actual test is of value in informing us as to the degree of soundness of our ideas. All persons must be shocked by the misfit between what they supposed to be true and what they find by trial to be fact, before they will waken up and do their best thinking. The superabundance of advice that bachelor uncles and maiden aunts offer in regard to the rearing of children is due to the fact that their theory has not been refined by practice. It is the direct contact with the world in the use of knowledge that reveals the latter's real significance and that converts it into experience; and it is only the knowledge that becomes experience that really counts in education.

Again, in arguing the question of allowing normal schools to grant degrees, a certain well-known educator declares: "Where ability to exercise a practical art is concerned, degrees are or should be valueless. They should be restricted merely to the position of evidences of culture. For this reason normal schools should not grant degrees." [Footnote: Year Book of National Society for Scientific Study of Education, 1905, p. 93.] Our better normal schools—which are the only kind that might be expected to grant degrees—give instruction in literature, history, geography, fine art, etc., the same as the degree-conferring colleges. To these subjects the normal school adds the history of education and the principles of education, which are presumably harmless so long as they are not applied, and they usually are not. There remain then the subjects that involve practice, such as special method courses, applied psychology and practice teaching; these must be the baneful studies. The good four- year normal school course presumably requires as much thinking and other strenuous work as that of the college. But the presence of the last group of subjects signifies that this study is to culminate in the use of knowledge; and there's the rub. It is this latter fact that vitiates the course and precludes the cultural effect that a college course insures.