Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

6. Declensions, conjugations, comparison, and genders of words in such foreign languages as the pupil expects to read, write, and speak.

7. The most necessary fact-lore of history and geography.

8. Choice selections from the best literature and such definitions as mark a triumph of intellect in the history of human thought.

This enumeration may indicate the range and kind of knowledge which should be fixed in the mechanical memory so that the mind may be in possession of the best instruments of thought evolved by ages of civilization. Many of the things above named must be learned by an effort of retention, pure and simple, like that of the boy who is sent to a store to buy half a dozen sheets of paper, two yards of ribbon, five dozen eggs, and specified quantities of salt, flour, and other provisions. He may write these on paper and thus ease the memory burden, but in solving mathematical problems and in reading, writing, or speaking a foreign language it is impossible always to carry for use written or printed tables, vocabularies, and lexicons. To use these in thinking, one must have them on his tongue and at his fingers’ end. Of course it makes a difference whether one wishes simply to read a language, like Latin or Greek, or to use it, like French and German, in conversation and correspondence. In the former instance it is sufficient to learn the language symbols through the eye; in the latter they must be acquired through the ear, the tongue, and the pen.

Time for learning languages.

It is a wise provision of nature that the perceptive powers and the mechanical memory are most active in childhood and youth. The normal child is hungry for words and facts, and gathers information from every conceivable quarter. The judgment and the reason develop after the mind has been stored with the materials upon which these may act. Parents and teachers who are ignorant of this order of development often force the reasons for arithmetical processes upon the pupil when these are difficult and when he could learn the eleven hundred variations of the Greek verb without difficulty, whilst the study of the classical and foreign languages is postponed to an age when the acquisition of a new language becomes a difficult task because the logical memory has driven the mechanical into the background, and the growth of judgment and reason makes the pupil crave the intellectual food furnished by the thought-studies. It is a species of cruelty to force upon children the consideration of the why’s and the wherefore’s of mathematical operations, when learning how to go through the motions would be quite enough of a tax upon their mental strength. Some of the demonstrations in arithmetic are logically more difficult than many of the proofs in geometry; hence no pupil should be asked to pass his final examination in arithmetic before he has mastered the elements of geometry. The proper sequence of subjects is of immense importance in leading the child from the lower to the higher forms of intellectual activity. With the proper study of geometry the logical memory steps to the front, and the thought-studies should then supplant those which largely appeal to the mechanical memory.

Nevertheless, it is a distinct loss if the verbal or mechanical memory is ever allowed to drop into desuetude. On this point the practice, as well as the testimony, of Dr. W. T. Harris is worthy of the attention of every person charged with the training of himself or others.

Harris on the memory.

“If a person finds himself forgetful of names, it is a health-giving process to take a certain portion of time in committing to memory words. If this is done by committing new masterpieces of poetry and prose, or in committing to memory the words of a new language, there is profit or gain to the thinking powers, as well as to the memory. Doubtless the cultivation of verbal memory, building up, as it does, a certain convolution in the brain, has a tendency to prevent atrophy in that organ. This contains a hint in the direction of keeping up in the later part of life the faculties which are usually so active in youth. The tendency is to neglect childish faculties and allow them to become torpid. But if this is liable to weaken certain portions of the brain in such a way as to induce hemorrhage, ending in softening of the brain, certainly the memory should be cultivated, if only for the health of the brain, and the memory for mechanical items of detail should be cultivated on grounds of health as well as on grounds of culture. The extreme advocates of the rational method of teaching are perhaps wrong in repudiating entirely all mechanical memory of dates and names or items. Certainly they are right in opposing the extremes of the old pedagogy, which obliged the pupils to memorize, page after page, the contents of a grammar verbatim et literatim et punctuatim (as, for instance, the graduates of the Boston Latin School tell us was the custom early in this century). But is there not a middle ground? Is there not a minimum list of details, of dates and names which must and should be memorized, both on account of the health of the nervous system and on account of the intrinsic usefulness of the data themselves? And must not the person in later life continue to exercise these classes of memory which deal with details for the sake of physical health? This is a question for the educational pathologist.”[23]