Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

Examples.

A machinist, who was also a skilled mechanic, was compelled by circumstances to quit his trade and to accept a position as janitor. One day the pipe leading from the sink to the sewer was clogged. The teacher, in conjunction with a carpenter, worked a long time to fix it, but in vain. The janitor was called, who in a few moments overcame the difficulty by the application of a principle in natural philosophy on which the teacher could have talked learnedly, although he knew not how to apply it in the given case. The janitor related how the foreman in a foundry was baffled in the effort to bore a hole through a piece of iron until a workman, trained under a foreign master, suggested the purchase of two things at a drug-store by means of which the hole was easily bored. When the druggist asked about the use that was to be made of these chemicals, he was told that the use was one of the mysteries of the machinist’s trade.

Next, the carpenter fixed the mortise lock of a door which needed attention, and the others lauded the skill with which he handled his tools and applied his knowledge. Before the three separated, the janitor’s son came with a word which he could not find in his lexicon. With the aid of chalk and black-board and grammar, the teacher showed how to dig out the roots of a Greek verb and what beautiful changes occur in its conjugation. The turn had come for the tradesmen to admire the mysterious skill and power of the teacher.

In applying the principle of natural philosophy, the janitor made skilful use of one or two tools which the teacher and the carpenter had never seen. He could express thought through the tools of his own handicraft, in ways that they could not. Each one of the three men knew the tools and the mysteries of his own vocation. During the entire scene there was not a logical flaw in the thinking of any one of them. Probably there was little difference in their native ability; certainly none in the fundamental nature of their thought-processes. The practical difference resulted from the data at their command and from the tools they were using to express the thoughts peculiar to their several vocations.

Man, the tool-user.

Instruments of thought the second essential.

The power to use tools, instruments, and machinery lifts man above the brute creation. There is labor-saving machinery in thinking as well as in manual labor. The more perfect the tools with which we work the greater the results we can achieve without waste of effort. In thinking as well as in working we must use the best tools in order to attain the greatest facility and efficiency. Yonder are two wheat-fields. In one of them a giant is wielding the sickle of our forefathers; in the other a youth, not yet out of his teens, is at work. At the close of the day the work of the giant will not bear comparison with that of the lad, because the latter was sitting upon a self-binder. They had the same material to work upon, yet, in spite of his superior strength, the giant could not cope with his weaker though better-equipped competitor. In like manner, the youth who has mastered the algebraic equation, or the symbols and formulas of chemistry, is in many respects the superior of a much brighter man who is not in possession of these tools or instruments of thought. A boy of average capacity who goes through a good high school thereby acquires certain fundamental ideas and the accompanying instruments of thought by which he is enabled to solve problems entirely beyond the power of a much brighter boy who never studies beyond the grammar grade.

Confusion in thought and practice.

The instruments of thought are generally spoken of as symbols, whilst the materials of thought are the things for which the symbols stand. In thinking, the mind may employ the ideas which correspond to the things in the external world; or it may employ the symbols by which science indicates things that have been definitely fixed or quantified. Failure to distinguish the sign from the thing signified, the symbol from its reality, leads to confusion in thought and to the most disastrous results in mental development. Loss of appetite for knowledge must inevitably result from methods of teaching by which the pupil is expected to learn the sounds of the letters from their names, or musical sounds from the notation on the staff, or the ideas of number from the arabic notation, or a knowledge of flowers from the technical terms of a text-book, or a knowledge of chemical elements and substances from the definitions, descriptions, and formulas of a scientific treatise. The symbol is indispensable in advanced thinking; but to expect the learner to get the fundamental ideas of a science from words, symbols, and definitions is evidence that the teacher does not understand the nature of thinking. It may, therefore, be helpful to set forth clearly the important distinction between thinking in things and thinking in symbols; to point out their relative value in mental development; and to fix their place in a rational system of education.