Thought and volition.
Now, it is easy to see the relation of thinking to these several stages of will-development. Volition presupposes something to be done, an end to be sought and accomplished. If the will is to act steadily in the endeavor to realize this end, the end must be clearly thought and held before the soul in definite form. To do the right implies that the right be known as the result of right thinking. A soul ignorant of right cannot be expected to practise the virtues which are grounded in the law of right. On the other hand, many forms of evil are never conceived by young people unless suggested to them by their superiors.
Volition issues in doing, and doing is a powerful stimulus to thinking. Making things out of wood, metal, marble, wax, papier-maché, or even out of paper is genuine thinking in things. It is a species of doing which flows from thinking through willing and reacts upon the process of thinking. To see how a thing is made is better than to be told how, but to make it by our own effort, skill, and thought is vastly more educative than seeing and hearing. Manual training tends to make the pupil intellectually honest. He cannot get away from a thought expressed in wood or other material as he can from a thought expressed in language which may suffice to suggest his idea, but not to give it adequate expression. This influence of doing upon thinking has led to the formulation of the maxim, We learn to do by doing,—a maxim whose limitations and legitimate meaning it will be necessary to discuss in a separate lecture.
XX
THINKING AND DOING
When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the field of reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction of all those methods of concrete object-teaching which are the glory of our contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as they are, are insufficient. The pupil’s words may be right, but the concepts corresponding to them are often direfully wrong. In a modern school, therefore, they form only a small part of what the pupil is required to do. He must keep note-books, make drawings, plans, and maps, take measurements, enter the laboratory and perform experiments, consult authorities, and write essays. He must do, in his fashion, what is often laughed at by outsiders when it appears in prospectuses under the title of original work; but what is really the only possible training for the doing of original work thereafter. The most colossal improvement which recent years have seen in secondary education lies in the introduction of manual-training schools; not because they will give us a people more handy and practical for domestic life, and better skill in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual life. Laboratory work and shop work engender a habit of observation, a knowledge of the difference between accuracy and vagueness, and an insight into nature’s complexity and into the inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena, which once brought into the mind remain there as life-long possessions. They confer precision; because, if you are doing a thing, you must do it definitely right or definitely wrong. They give honesty; for, when you express yourself by making things, and not by using words, it becomes impossible to dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity. They beget a habit of self-reliance; they keep the interest and attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher’s disciplinary function to a minimum.
William James.