How to Study and Teaching How to Study

by Frank M. McMurry

3. Cultivation of sympathy.

A good measure of kindly feeling in one's make-up is, perhaps, the greatest single remedy against a too static condition of ideas. Feeling seems to have a double function in making one open and plastic. A kindly attitude toward new ideas is necessary before they can be viewed long enough to have their value tested. We must be positively friendly, or willing to see worth, before we can see it. Sympathy thus secures a hearing for new ideas. It was because the Jews lacked this feeling and consequent willingness, that Jesus condemned them for seeing not, though they had eyes, and for hearing not, though they had ears.

Feeling is also a condition of the appreciation of new thought after it has once secured a hearing. By a sort of intuition the significance of a fact is often felt long before the intellect has furnished proof of its value, the power of feeling supplying motive in this way for the intellect to do its work. And, again, until the conclusions formed by the intellect have reached the feelings, they exert little influence upon one's ways of thinking and acting. Cold sermons have little effect on most persons, even though, their logic forces assent to them. Appreciation of worth thus greatly depends upon one's capacity of feeling.

Considerable warmth of heart or mellowness of nature due to sympathy is, therefore, an important factor in rendering one willing to listen to new ideas and to be influenced by them. Without much feeling, a man is likely to be narrow and unyielding. Gradgrind, in Dickens's Hard Times, is a shining example of this type. In his excessive devotion to "hard facts" his emotional nature atrophied, until the many valuable cues or suggestions about the conduct of his business and the training of his children that a kindlier nature would have caught from the events occurring about him, failed to affect him, and on that account he went to smash. He admirably illustrates in a negative way Carlyle's striking statement that "never wise head yet was without warm heart," and he throws light on the profoundness of Saint Paul's meaning when he said, "Love is…never conceited…but has full sympathy with truth."

Without an abundance of affection a man is self-centered, a selfish aristocrat. Sympathy or love allows the ideas of others to be lifted to a plane on a level with his own and thus helps greatly toward his tolerance and receptiveness.

It is true that the scientist urges the elimination of all personal feeling in his investigations. He wants to be as purely intellectual as possible, in order to see things as they are, while personal bias tends to color facts and to that extent to vitiate them. It is chiefly, however, prejudice of all sorts in testing and judging truth that he is anxious to avoid, rather than any feeling of unalloyed interest in it. A certain warmth of feeling is necessary for its comprehension as well as its evaluation. The biologist, for instance, must be in close sympathy with birds in order to understand them, just as a mother must be in close sympathy with her child in order to understand him.

It would scarcely be worth while to include these thoughts were we not able to preserve and increase our capacity of feeling, in kind and degree, just as we can preserve and increase our knowledge. It is partly with this object that we have so broad a curriculum, even in the primary school, including music, painting, and literature, as well as other subjects. Literature certainly possesses great value for developing broad sympathy; it is at least a question if literary men do not exhibit less prejudice toward new ideas than scientists, although so much emphasis is placed upon induction, and judgment according to evidence, in the training of the latter that they might be expected to be especially open-minded.

In addition to broad study, we can take pains not to study too much, that is, not so much as to crowd out the emotional life. Insight is only one of several large factors in a good education, and the ambitious student is always in danger of becoming too exclusively intellectual for the highest scholarship. The true relation of insight to feeling is well illustrated in Lincoln's life, when in the midst of the most serious and pressing problems he took time for jesting and humorous tales. In spite of condemnation by his subordinates for levity, he had excellent grounds for such conduct; for not only was relaxation secured in this manner—which was important enough—but his own natural warmth of sympathy was also restored, which was of greatest value in weighing the worth of suggestions and events. Humor is an important aid to any serious person in preserving balance; a good laugh restores perspective.

While it is the duty of the more mature student to cultivate for himself a many-sided emotional life, even at the expense of some knowledge, it is the duty of teachers of children in particular to give them material help in this direction. There are few schools that do not emphasize learning to the neglect of feeling. The teacher can help first of all by avoiding setting a coldly intellectual example. In addition she can study the conduct of children with the object of correcting their narrowness. Many a child who isolates himself from conversation and play at recess is growing one-sided, whether he spends the time in doing nothing or in studying. He should be influenced to enjoy play and social life, just as he should be influenced to study, and it is the teacher's task to single out such cases and restore them to their normal condition.

4. Subordination of authority to reason.