Thinking and learning to think

by Nathan Christ Schaeffer

The idea of self is complex. It includes our thoughts, emotions, and purposes. Kindred and friends, home and country, creed and occupation, dress and personal appearance, possessions and the work one has done,—in fact, all one has and is and does enters into the idea of self. When we lose a child, a manuscript, an investment, a position, we are apt to feel as if a part of ourselves had been lost. So closely are the things of self identified with the inner self, the self in the narrowest signification of the term, that the latter is oftentimes lost in the former; and the end of existence is sought in wealth, fame, honor, social position, erudition, and the thousand other things which intensify the feeling of self by giving it form and content.

Image of self.

An important element in the thought of self is the image of self that every man carries in his own mind. This image of self is derived from looking-glasses and photographs, from the sight of hands and feet and the other impressions of the physical organism which reach the mind through the senses. In the minds of many persons the image of self is ever present, it matters not whether they are eating or drinking, walking or talking, singing or thinking, posing or working. The perpetual presence of the image of self gives rise to vanity and pride, to avarice, ambition, and other detestable forms of selfishness.

It is the province of education to bring self and the things of self into proper relation with the not-self, with God and the universe. That this may be accomplished the images of sense and the idea of self must be made to take their proper place in the domain of thought and volition.

Education defined.

Not many years ago it was customary in certain quarters to define education as the process of unsensing the mind and unselfing the will. The definition never became popular. It contains a truth and an error, both deserving of careful consideration. The maxim may signify that by the process of education the soul is to be emancipated from the tyranny of the senses and from the domination of selfish desires. The mind may be hindered in its growth because it is under the thraldom of desire and appetite. Excess in eating and drinking, in sight-seeing, and in other pleasures which so easily ripen into dissipation may check the normal development of the higher faculties. The delight which some gifted natures find in beautiful colors and good music may prevent them from acquiring the power of abstract and abstruse thinking. The things of the mind may be sacrificed to the things of sense, the higher life of the soul may be stifled through the exaltation of self and the domination of selfish desires.

Unsensing the mind.

What is meant by unsensing the mind? It may mean, for instance, that the student of arithmetic is to be freed from the necessity of counting strokes or fingers in finding the sum or the product of two numbers; that the learner is to get away from the cats and dogs of the First Reader as soon as possible; that he is to be lifted by education to the plane on which he can think in abstract and general terms. In this sense it is correct to say that it is the purpose of education to unsense the mind. The phrase may also be interpreted to imply that the habit of thinking by means of visual images is to be got rid of. In this sense it is a dangerous maxim.

Arrested development.

The first thinking of children is carried on in mental pictures. It is one of the aims of the school to lift the learner above this necessity of thinking in things by enabling him to think in symbols. These symbols are in their turn visualized; and we may have specimens of arrested development in the use of figures as well as in the use of fingers, blocks, or other objects employed in teaching the fundamental operations of integers and fractions. The principal of a well-known ward school aimed at great speed in arithmetical calculations. The results which his teachers obtained excited surprise and admiration. The test of progress was the number of digits that a pupil could add, or subtract, or multiply, or divide in a minute. The danger of this instruction became apparent when it was found that of five or six hundred children drilled in that way only one ever reached the high school, and she was only a third-rate student, who never acquired skill or proficiency in thinking in abstract and general terms. Mental energy was exhausted in the attempt to develop lightning calculators. There was no growth in the direction of thinking the laws and truths which make knowledge scientific.