Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

Vocabularies.

A teacher of Hebrew spent one-fourth of his time in drill on Hebrew roots and their meaning. His students groaned under the drudgery imposed. At the end of the first six chapters of Genesis, he surprised his class by the announcement, “Now you know half the words in the Hebrew Bible.” He had selected words used five hundred times, then words used three hundred times, and drilled on these in various ways until he had fixed all the words in most frequent use in the Hebrew text. It was a great saving of time in the end, and a great step towards reading at sight the Old Testament in the original. By the modern short-cuts to knowledge the pupils are hurried from one classic author to another, and hence they never master the vocabulary to the extent of reading Latin or Greek at sight. A little less haste at the start, and a little more drill for the purpose of fixing new words as they come up, thus avoiding the everlasting turning to the lexicon for more than half the words in a lesson, would facilitate progress and enable the student to find some pleasure in the study of foreign languages.

Teaching languages.

An old teacher of Latin, who had discovered this secret in the acquisition of a foreign tongue, agreed to take a small class in Livy on condition that the students write in a special blank-book and review every day all the words whose meaning they were required to hunt in the lexicon. At the end of ten weeks half the class read two pages without looking up more than two words. Their study of Latin not only gave them a sense of pleasure, but, in thinking the thoughts of the author through the medium of the eye-symbols and then putting them into good English, they acquired excellent thought-material, an extensive vocabulary, and superior skill in syntactical construction. It proved a most valuable exercise in thinking and in the expression of thought.

Logical memory.

Valuable as the mechanical memory is for the purpose of furnishing the thought-instruments, it sinks into comparative insignificance alongside of the logical memory. The latter is the memory for ideas, binding them by associations based on cause and effect, reason and consequence, similarity and contrast, the general and the particular. It is the kind of memory by which the mind carries a knowledge of the laws of science, the principles of art, the salient points of a discourse, the train of ideas in a book, the leading thoughts in a system of philosophy. It converts history and geography from a dry collection of facts, dates, and names into a living organism whose parts are internally related by a plastic principle, and combined into a whole that has order and system in every detail. How much better that a pupil’s knowledge of history and geography should be thus systematized than that it should resemble a wilderness of facts! As a means for furnishing thought-material, the logical memory is far more valuable than the memory which holds words and things by the accidental ties of sound, sight, and fanciful relations.

Latham’s classification.

A classification of the forms of memory into portative, analytical, and assimilative, given in Latham’s book on the “Action of Examinations,” is helpful in determining the relation of memory to thinking.

Portative memory.