In the School-Room: Chapters in the Philosophy of Education

by John S. Hart

A quality of memory vastly more important than quickness, is tenacity. To hold on to what we get, is the secret of mental, no less than of pecuniary accumulations. The mind, too, like other misers, clings most tenaciously to that which has cost it most labor. Come lightly, go lightly, the world over. Knowledge which comes into the mind without toil and effort, without protracted and laborious attention, is apt to go as easily as it came.

But, by far the most important quality of memory, for the practical purposes of life, is readiness. Like quickness and tenacity, it is to be greatly improved, if not acquired by practice. It is in the cultivation of this quality, that the power of a good teacher shines forth most conspicuously. Quickness and tenacity may be cultivated by solitary study. But readiness requires for its development a live teacher, and the stir of the school-room and the class. Here it is that the art of questioning shows its wonderful resources. Repeated and continued interrogatories, judiciously worded, have a sort of talismanic power. They oblige the scholar to bring out his knowledge from its hidden recesses, to turn it over and over, and inside out, and upside down, to look at it and to handle it, so that not only it becomes forever and indestructibly his own, but he can ever afterwards use it at will with the same readiness that he uses his hands or his eyes. This is what a skilful teacher may do for his scholars, by a knowledge and practice of the art of questioning. Unfortunately, teachers in general find it much easier passively to hear a lesson, than to muster as much intellectual energy as is necessary to ask a question.

It was a remark of Bacon's, that, if we wish to commit anything to memory, we will accomplish more in ten readings, if at each perusal we make the attempt to repeat it from memory, referring to the book only when the memory fails, than we would by a hundred readings made in the ordinary way, and without any intervening trials. The explanation of this fact is, that each effort to recollect the passage secures to the subsequent perusal a more intense degree of attention; and it seems to be a law of our nature, not only that there is no memory without attention, which I have labored at some length to establish, but that the degree of memory is in a great measure proportioned to the degree of the attention.

You will see at once the bearing of this fact upon that species of intellectual dissipation, called "general reading," in which the mental voluptuary reads merely for momentary excitement, in the gratification of an idle curiosity, and which is as enervating and debilitating to the intellectual faculties, as other kinds of dissipation are to the bodily functions. One book, well read and thoroughly digested, nay, one single train of thought, carefully elaborated and attentively considered, is worth more than any conceivable amount of that indolent, dreamy sort of reading in which many persons indulge. There is in fact no more unsafe criterion of knowledge than the number of books a man has read. A young man once told me he had read the entire list of publications of the American Sunday-School Union. He was about as wise as the man at the hotel, who began at the top of the bill of fare with the intention of eating straight through to the bottom! Depend upon it, this mental gorging is debilitating and debauching alike to the moral and the intellectual constitution. There is too much reading even of good books. No one should ever read a book, without subsequent meditation or conversation about it, and an attempt to make the thoughts his own, by a vigorous process of mental assimilation. Any continuous intellectual occupation, which does not leave us wiser and stronger, most assuredly will leave us weaker, just as filling the body with food which it does not digest, only makes it feeble and sickly. We are the worse for reading any book, if we are not the better for it.

There is an obvious distinction on this subject, of some practical importance, first suggested, so far as I am aware, by the Scotch metaphysician, Dr. Reid, between attention as directed to external objects, and the same faculty directed to what passes within us. When we attend to what is without us, to what we hear, or see, or smell, or taste, or touch, the process is called observation. When, on the other hand, dismissing for the time all notice of the external world, we turn our thoughts inward, and consider only what is passing in the inner chambers of the mind,—when, for instance, we analyze our motives, or notice the workings of passion, or scan the mysterious and subtle agency of the will, the process is called reflection. This latter species of attention is one much more difficult of development than the former. It is developed ordinarily much later in life,—seldom, I believe, developed to any considerable extent before the age of manhood,—developed by some professions and pursuits much more than by others,—and in a very large class of mankind, probably the majority, never developed at all.

This species of attention, which is thus directed inwards, subjective attention some would call it,—in other words, the reflective powers,—are, I doubt not, capable of being cultivated much earlier in life than the age which I have indicated as the normal period of their development. I am constrained, however, in opposition to many high authorities in education, to doubt the wisdom of a precocious cultivation of this part of our intellectual system. In all our plans of education, we should closely follow nature, who seems to have reserved the judgment and the reflective powers for the latest, as they certainly are the most perfect, of her endowments. We, who are teachers, have chiefly to do with those whose powers are as yet immature, and whose attention is to be cultivated primarily in its direction to external objects. Our business, in other words, is to train our pupils first of all to habits of observation.

In doing this, it is of some practical importance to bear in mind the well-known difference, in respect to memory, between the objects of different senses. Whether it be attributed to the different degrees of perfection with which the qualities of bodies are perceived, or to some difference in the qualities themselves, or whatever may be the cause, the fact is established beyond a question, that the knowledge which comes to us through the medium of the eye is of all kinds of knowledge the most easily and the most perfectly remembered. We remember, indeed, the temperature of one day as distinguished from that of another; we remember the sound of a voice; we can conceive, in its absence, the odor or the taste of a particular object; but none of these ideas come to us with that definiteness and perfection which mark our recollections of what we have seen. It requires, for instance, but ordinary powers of attention and perception, for a person who has one good look at a house, to recall distinctly to his mind the ideas of its height, shape, color, material, the number of stories, the pitch of the roof, the kind of shutters to the windows, the position of the door, the fashion of panels, the bell-handle, the plate, even the little canary-bird with its cage in the windows above, and the roses, geraniums, and what else may be fairer still, in the window below. These are all objects of sight. In their absence, he can bring to mind and describe them, with almost the same accuracy that he could if they were actually present. Now, it is impossible to obtain a like precision and fulness in our conceptions of a quality which we have learned through any other sense. We form in the one case a mental image or picture of the object, which in the other case is impossible. We can by no possibility form a mental or any other image of the song of canary, of the perfume of a rose, or of any other quality, except those which address us through the eye. Our conceptions of taste, smell, touch, and even of hearing, in the absence of the objects of sense, have a certain dimness, vagueness, mistiness, uncertainty about them. The conceptions of visible objects, on the contrary, are definite, precise, and most easily recalled. Hence the knowledge derived through the sight, is, of all kinds of knowledge, the most accurate, the most easily acquired, and the most lasting.

The practical application of these views to the science of teaching, is too obvious to require more than a passing notice. Every thing which the young are to make the subject of their attention, for the purpose of remembering it, should be represented as far as possible to the eye. If the object itself, on account of its bulk, or its expensiveness, or for any other reason, cannot be exhibited for inspection, let there be some visible delineation of it by brush or pencil. If the thing to be remembered be something abstract or unreal, having neither form nor substance, perhaps it may have, or the teacher may make for it, some concrete, visible symbol, as has been done with the formulas of logic and the abstractions of arithmetic and algebra. These visible symbols on the slate and the blackboard give to those sciences all the advantages in this respect which were supposed to be peculiar to some of the branches of physical science. A boy who has forgotten every mere verbal rule both of arithmetic and algebra, will remember the formula, x² + 2xy + y², just as perfectly and on the same principle, as he will remember the face of the man who taught it to him. It is something which he has seen. Why has geometry in all ages been found to be of such peculiar value as a means of intellectual training? Because of the visible delineation of its doctrines by diagrams addressed to the eye. How much more readily and certainly chemical science can now be acquired, since the adoption of the present mode of symbolizing its doctrines by combinations of letters and figures. Arguments, conjectures, theories, respecting qualities addressed alike to every sense, respecting functions indeed not cognizable by any sense, are now presented on the board in visible symbolic formulas, which have the same advantage over the former mode of presenting the subject, that the sight of a chess-board during the progress of a game has over a mere verbal description of the movements.

The truth of this doctrine is strikingly illustrated in the present mode of teaching geography, as compared with that once in use, when a child, instead of looking at the map of a country, with its boundaries and other physical characters painted to the eye, had to grope through a trackless wilderness of description. The study will be still more improved, when children shall be universally required to make as well as to look at maps,—when, to the definiteness of knowledge coming through the sight, there shall be added that inerasible impression upon the memory, which comes from fixedness and continuity of attention. It is impossible for a child to draw a map, without looking intently, and with continued attention, upon every part of that which is to be delineated. The two conditions to perfect recollection are combined, and the knowledge, which is the result, is the very last to fade from the memory.

Every teacher of small children knows how much more certainly they learn to spell by seeing than by hearing. You may repeat to a child five times over the sounds which make up a word, and he will not recollect it with half the certainty that he would on seeing it once. The same principle which leads to this result, and which indicates the propriety, not only of looking at maps but of making them, in order to the more perfect knowledge of geography, will suggest to the thoughtful teacher the expediency of children's not only looking at words, but of writing them, in order to become perfect spellers.