A parable.
Hear a parable. A teacher sat down to dinner. The waiter handed him the bill of fare. The proprietor followed the waiter to the kitchen, directed him to cut out the names of the eatables which had been ordered, and to carry these names on plates to the dining-room. “It is not these words,” exclaimed the guest, “that I desire to eat, but the things in the kitchen for which these words stand.” “Isn’t that what you pedagogues are doing all the time, expecting children to make an intellectual meal on words such as are found in the columns of the spelling-book and attached on maps to the black dots which you call cities? My boy gravely informs me that every State capital has its ring, because on his map there is always a ring around the dot called the capital of a country.” The teacher was forced to admit that there is, alas! too much truth in the allegation. In the afternoon he took revenge. Knowing that the proprietor had a thousand-dollar draft to be cashed, he arranged with the banker to have it paid in silver coin. When the landlord saw the growing heap of coin, he exclaimed, “If I must be paid in silver, can you not give me silver certificates?” “Did you not intimate to me,” said the teacher, tapping him on the shoulder, “that it is the real things we want, and not words and symbols which stand for realities?” The landlord was obliged to admit that in the larger transactions of the mercantile world it saves time and is far more convenient to use checks, drafts, and other symbols for money than it would be to use the actual cash. In elementary transactions, like the purchase of a necktie, it is better to use the cash, to think and deal in real money, but when it comes to the distribution of five and one-half million dollars among the school districts of Pennsylvania, it is better to draw warrants upon the State Treasurer, to use checks and drafts, and to think in figures, than it would be to count so much coin, and send the appropriation in that form all over a great commonwealth.
Its interpretation.
The parable hardly needs an interpretation. Its lesson points in two directions. On the one hand, it shows in the true light every species of rote teaching, of parrot-like repetition of definitions, statements, and lists of words which give a show of knowledge without the substance. It puts the seal of condemnation on most forms of pure memory work. It sounds the note of warning to all teachers who are trying to improve the memory by concert recitations. The boy whose class was taught to define a point as position without length, breadth, or thickness, and who, when asked to recite alone, gave the definition, “A point has a physician without strength, health, or sickness,” is but one of many specimens of class-teaching condemned by the parable. It says in unmistakable terms that all elementary instruction must start in the concrete, taking up the objects or things to be known, and resolutely refusing to begin with statements and definitions which to the children are a mere jargon of words.
Making blockheads.
On the other hand, the parable indicates how too long-continued use of the concrete may arrest development, and hinder the learner from reaching the stages of advanced thinking. It hints that the too constant use of blocks, however valuable at first, ultimately begets blockheads, instead of intelligences capable of the higher life of thought and reflection. A rational system of pedagogy involves proper attention to the materials of thought and proper care in furnishing the instruments by which advanced thinking is made easy and effective. In one respect the parable does not set forth the whole truth. It makes no account of differences in thinking due to heredity and mental training. The differences in native ability are, however, not as great as is generally supposed (unless the feeble-minded enter into the comparison); the differences due to correct training, or the neglect of it, are far more striking. The work expected of the pupil should, of course, tally with his capacity; otherwise it will force him to resort to pernicious helps, beget in him wrong habits of study, rob him of the sense of mastery and the joy of intellectual achievement, and destroy his self-reliance, his power of initiative, and his ability to grapple with difficult problems and perplexing questions. The power to think grows by judicious exercise. Here better than anywhere else in the whole domain of school work can we distinguish the genuine coin from its counterfeit, and discriminate between true skill and quackery, between the artist and the artisan. It is at this point that most help can be given to young teachers by a good course of lectures on learning to think and on the difficult art of stimulating others to think.