Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

If violations of the fundamental laws of teaching occur in our higher institutions of learning, what may we not expect in the lower schools where the teaching is intrusted to young people of limited education? Nevertheless, it is a notorious fact that the worst forms of teaching are found in our higher institutions of learning, where many of the professors seem to know as little of the science of education as the motorman knows of the science of electricity; otherwise they would make impossible the use of “ponies, coaches, and keys,” by means of which the student taxes the memory rather than the understanding, and ultimately loses all power of independent thought and investigation. Such helps arrest mental development, destroy the power of original thinking, and do more harm than the practice of feeding the mind with mere verbal statements which in course of time may acquire content and meaning. The study of the sciences which classify minerals, plants, insects, birds, fishes, and other animals may degenerate into a mere study of words, even when the student acquires some familiarity with the specimens to be classified. The scientific name is the one thing about a flower with which the Creator has had nothing to do, and if the recognition of the scientific name is the chief or sole aim of the student of botany, it is a genuine case of feeding the mind on words.

Words as material for thought.

Geometry as thought-material.

By those who are fond of scientific pursuits the dead languages are sometimes despised as though the study of them were learned playing with mere words. Among people who begin their education somewhat late in life there is a strong temptation to estimate linguistic studies very far below their true value as a means for disciplining the reasoning faculty. When pursued in the right way, the study of the classical languages furnishes as much good material for thought as the natural sciences. Huxley may charm an audience by a lecture on a piece of chalk; the philologist can excite equal interest by a lecture on the word chalk. Words grow and undergo changes according to well-defined laws which furnish as much food for thought as the laws governing the union of atoms or the motions of the heavenly bodies. The words of a lexicon contain as much of precious interest in the sight of man as the manufactured gases or the plucked leaves and dissected flowers of the laboratory. Greek and Latin roots have more vitality in them than the collections of stones, stuffed birds, and transfixed bugs in the museum. The endings of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs furnish ample opportunity for observation, comparison, and reflection; their functions in the syntax of the sentence furnish splendid exercises in formal and qualitative thinking. If, however, the time of the pupil is entirely consumed in mastering the hundreds of exceptions to the rules of gender and case, of declensions and conjugations, of syntax and prosody, it is another sad instance of feeding the mind on mere words. The pupil who begins the study of any foreign language before he has reached his teens should acquire the power to read the language at sight; otherwise there has been something faulty in the methods of teaching or of study, or in both. A man is as many times a man as he knows languages; and the comparison of the idioms of two or more languages furnishes most excellent material for careful and accurate thinking. In translating an author like Plato the student must think the thoughts of a master mind, weigh words so as to detect the finer shades of meaning, and arrange them in sentences that shall adequately express the meaning of the original. The value of pure mathematics, especially the Euclidian geometry, as a means for the cultivation of thinking, lies in the limited number of fundamental concepts which must be clearly fixed and in the nature of the reasoning by which the truth of the theorems is established. The axioms are few in number and easily grasped; the quantities to be defined can, without difficulty, be set in a clear light before the understanding; the chain of proof compels the mind to join ideas by their logical nexus, and if the learner persists in memorizing the demonstration, he is at once detected. And yet when, as sometimes happens, he goes over several books of geometry without clearly perceiving the difference between an angle and a triangle, it must be a genuine specimen of acquiring words without the corresponding ideas.

S. S. Greene’s views.

The words of S. S. Greene deserve the attention of every teacher anxious to prevent the formation of vicious habits of thought by the pupils in our schools and colleges. Years ago he wrote as follows: “While an external object may be viewed by thousands in common, the idea or image of it addresses itself only to the individual consciousness. My idea or image is mine alone,—the reward of careless observation, if imperfect; of attentive, careful, and varied observation, if correct. Between mine and yours a great gulf is fixed. No man can pass from mine to yours, or from yours to mine. Neither, in any proper sense of the word, can mine be conveyed to you. Words do not convey thoughts; they are not vehicles of thought in any true sense of that term. A word is simply a common symbol which each associates with his own idea or image. Neither can I compare mine with yours, except through the mediation of external objects. And, then, how do I know that they are alike; that a measure called a foot, for instance, seems as long to you as to me? My idea of a new object, which you and I observe together, may be very imperfect. By it I attribute to the object what does not belong to it, take from it what does, distort its form, and otherwise pervert it. Suppose, now, at the time of observation we agree upon a word as a sign or symbol of the object or the idea of it. The object is withdrawn; the idea only remains,—imperfect in my case, complete and vivid in yours. The sign is employed. Does it bring back the original object? By no means. Does it convey my idea to your mind? Nothing of the kind; you would be disgusted with the shapeless image. Does it convey yours to me? No; I should be delighted at the sight. What does it effect? It becomes the occasion for each to call up his own image. Does each now contemplate the same thing? What multitudes of dissimilar images instantly spring up at the announcement of the same symbol!—dissimilar not because of anything in the one source whence they are derived, but because of either an inattentive and imperfect observation of that source, or some constitutional or habitual defect in the use of the perceptive faculty.”

J. P. Gordy’s statement.

Pestalozzi’s reform.

Dr. J. P. Gordy, to whom credit is due for the preceding quotation, further says, “Words are like paper money; their value depends on what they stand for. As you would be none the richer for possessing Confederate money to the amount of a million dollars, so your pupils would be none the wiser for being able to repeat book after book by heart, unless the words were the signs of ideas in their minds. Words without ideas are an irredeemable paper currency. It is the practical recognition of this truth that has revolutionized the best schools in the last quarter of a century.... In what did the reform inaugurated by Pestalozzi consist? In the substitution of the intelligent for the blind use of words. He reversed the educational engine. Before his time teachers expected their pupils to go from words to ideas; he taught them to go from ideas to words. He brought out the fact upon which I have been insisting,—that words are utterly powerless to create ideas; that all they can do is to help the pupil to recall and recombine ideas already formed. With Pestalozzi, therefore, and with those who have been imbued with his theories, the important matter is the forming of clear and definite ideas.”[4]

Sight and insight.