Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

Comparison.

At one time it was a mooted question whether the mind can think of more than one thing at a time. As a matter of doubt this question is no longer discussed. For, since all thinking involves comparison, if two objects are to be compared, they must be held before the mind at one and the same time. A good memory is, therefore, a very important aid to reflection.

Memorizing.

Two forms of memory.

And yet Thucydides and Lord Bolingbroke are said to have complained of a memory so retentive of details that it seriously interfered with their processes of thought. It is commonly believed that much memory work interferes with the growth and development of a pupil’s ability to think. “Much memorizing deadens the power of thought,” says W. T. Harris, who is recognized at home and abroad as one of the profoundest thinkers that America has produced. Innumerable anecdotes are told of great thinkers to show their forgetfulness in the commonest details of every-day life. These anecdotes are handed down from one generation of students to the next; their mirth-provoking character gives them vitality; they grow more ludicrous the oftener they are told; they do harm because they lead pupils to undervalue the importance of a good memory to those who are ambitious to shine as thinkers. Often, after it is too late, the student finds how he has crippled his whole intellectual life by neglect and abuse of the memory. A correct conception of the nature of memory and its function in every department of thought and research is of immense importance to those who teach, as well as to those who have gone far enough in their studies to give conscious direction to their own intellectual life. Most writers on education have treated, directly or indirectly, of the use and abuse of the memory; every examiner appeals to it more or less in the questions he puts; and every teacher shows the nature and extent of his skill in the kind of demands he makes upon the retentive power of his pupils. Take, for instance, the lesson in geometry. There are two ways of learning and giving the proof of a theorem: the language of the text-book may be committed to memory, and accepted in the class-room; or the pupil may fix in his mind the line of argument and give in his own language the successive steps of the demonstration. The former method is a sure sign of bad teaching and of defective habits of study. Whenever a skilful teacher finds his pupils giving the exact words of the text-book on geometry, he changes the lettering of the figure, and sometimes even the figure itself. He is not satisfied until he feels sure that the pupil is thinking the thoughts of the geometry and recalling the ideas by the inner nexus which binds them into a line of argument. He insists on it that the learner shall cultivate a memory for ideas rather than words.

Verbal memory.

Does it follow that the verbal memory is to be neglected and despised? This is the feeling of the learner who has tasted the joys of thinking; he hates the drudgery of learning by heart, because he has reached the age when logical memory begins to assert itself at the expense of the verbal memory. No less a psychologist than Professor James of Harvard has recently put in a plea for the verbal memory which, by reason of the abuses to which it was formerly subjected, has fallen into such disuse that pupils on reaching the high school are often unable to quote a single stanza of poetry. In his “Talks on Psychology to Teachers” he says,—

“The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them parrot-like in the school-room, rested on the truth that a thing merely read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest possible adhesion to the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is thus a highly important kind of reactive behavior on our impressions; and it is to be feared, in the reaction against the old parrot recitations as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal recitation as an element of complete training may nowadays be too much forgotten.”[22]

Association.

Psychologists have shown that, in remembering and recollecting, the mind works according to certain laws of association. Of two words or ideas which have been before the mind at the same time, or in immediate sequence, the one naturally tends to suggest the other. If the attention is directed to the words as they follow each other in a line of poetry, the memory will recall these in the order in which they occur. If the mind’s eye is fixed on the ideas which the words express, the memory may carry these by reason of the logical connection which exists between them. Often the connection between the two things which are to be remembered is purely arbitrary. Then the link which binds them together must be forged by some mechanical process like frequent oral repetition, or by constant gazing at them upon the printed page, or by writing them out so that the impression made upon the mind through the eye and the ear is further strengthened through the muscular sense. The latter species of memory is usually called the mechanical memory, in distinction from the memory for ideas, which has been aptly styled the logical memory.