Correct and forceful language is a gift to be coveted, a prize worth striving for; but it should never be made the all-absorbing aim of education. The teacher of any phase of language must for a time make his instruction the object of chief concern; but he should never ignore the fact that language is and ever should be an aid to thought, a stimulus to thinking, an embodiment of ideas, a medium of communication, a means to an end.
VIII
THE STIMULUS TO THINKING
Good methods of teaching are important, but they cannot supply the want of ability in the teacher. The Socratic method is good; but a Socrates behind the teacher’s desk to ask questions is better.
Thomas M. Balliet.
Of all forms of friendship in youth, by far the most effective as a means of education is that species of enthusiastic veneration which young men of loyal and well-conditioned minds are apt to contract for men of intellectual eminence in their own circles. The educating effect of such an attachment is prodigious; and happy the youth who forms one. We all know the advice given to young men to “think for themselves;” and there is sense and soundness in the advice; but if I were to select what I account perhaps the most fortunate thing that can befall a young man during the early period of his life,—the most fortunate, too, in the end, for his intellectual independence,—it would be his being voluntarily subjected for a time to some powerful intellectual slavery.
David Masson.