Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

It has been asserted that a child gains more knowledge in the first seven years of its life than in all its subsequent days. If the domain of abstract and scientific knowledge be excluded from the comparison, this is probably true. At any rate, if the thinking which is based upon the knowledge of facts thus gained is to be correct, the facts must be correctly observed.

Observation a source of thought-material.

Observation is thus of prime importance, not merely as furnishing a stimulus to thought, but also as supplying abundant materials of thought. Travel, experience, experiment, as well as the ordinary course of natural phenomena, furnish abundant opportunity for the formation of correct habits of observation. The observations thus made should be recorded in the memory, if not on manuscript. From the storehouse of the memory, thus filled with materials for thought, the mind derives many of the best data for reaching conclusions. Observation, experience, and reading, as sources of thought-material, presuppose an accurate and retentive memory in those who think well and act well. The relation of memory to thinking deserves treatment in a separate chapter.

Nature-study.

There is a limit to the number of observations which the mind can carry and use. Nature-study may be overdone. Mere seeing is not thinking. What the eye beholds must be sorted and assigned to its appropriate class; otherwise the treasure-house of memory will soon resemble a wilderness of meaningless facts. Than this only one thing can be worse,—namely, a wilderness of meaningless words.

Reading and observation.

Teaching a child to read.

First test.

Second test.

Reading is a species of observation. An exercise in oral reading, during which each pupil is called down as soon as he miscalls a word, is often an astonishing revelation, showing how few of the advanced pupils can accurately see and correctly name every word in a stanza or paragraph. Methods of teaching a beginner to read are correct in seeking to develop the ability to pronounce words without help from others. Faulty application of a method that is right in this respect may seriously retard, and even destroy, the power of thinking what is on the printed page. What on earth is a first-year pupil to do with the many hundred words which he is sometimes taught to pronounce? Often words are arranged in sentences which come dangerously near the slang of the slums, and which no child ever hears in a cultured home. Furthermore, some sentences in primers and first readers are well-nigh void of meaning, the aim being to teach the words for the sake of the combinations of letters which they contain. The first test to apply to a method of teaching a beginner to read is the question, How quickly does it teach that which must be known as a condition of pronouncing new words,—namely, the shape and the sound or sounds of each of the letters of the alphabet? As compared with the sound and the shape, the name of the letter is of relatively little importance. Students of Hebrew may read that language fluently without being able to repeat the Hebrew alphabet, the names of the letters being a mere matter of convenience in talking about them. The second great test to be applied to the method of teaching a beginner to read is the question, Does it form the habit of getting thought from the printed page? Grown men have admitted that they passed through several readers before they discovered that there was a meaning or connected story in the words which they were pronouncing. They saw and gave names to words very much as people see and give names to objects round about them without recognizing the significance of what is seen, or thinking the thoughts which the Author of the Universe has spread out before them in the great book of nature.