Thoroughness
Teachers are advised to be thorough in their instruction. They in turn urge their students to strive for thoroughness in study. We praise or impugn the scholarship of our colleagues because it possesses or lacks thoroughness. Here we have a quality of knowledge universally extolled. But what is meant by thoroughness? How can teachers or students know that they are attaining that degree of comprehension known as thoroughness? We are told that thoroughness is a relative condition, always changing with accompanying circumstances. Even an unattainable ideal can be defined,—why not thoroughness? We must, therefore, attempt to determine the meaning of thoroughness as used in teaching and study.
Negative interpretation of thoroughness
It may be helpful to formulate the common or lay interpretation of thoroughness. The term "thoroughness" is erroneously used in a quantitative sense to describe scholastic attainment. We are told of a colleague's thoroughness in history; he knows all names, dates, places, facts in the development of mankind; his knowledge of his specialty is encyclopedic; "there is no need of looking things up when he is around." A professor of English literature boasted of the thoroughness with which he teaches Hamlet: "Every word of value and every change in the form of versification are marked; every allusion is taken up, every peculiar grammatical construction is brought to the attention of the class." Here we have illustrations of an erroneous conception of thoroughness which gives it an extensive meaning and regards it as the accumulation of a mass of data.
Positive interpretation of thoroughness
Yet the master of chronological detail in history may have no historical imagination, no historical perspective, no historical judgment. He may possess the facts, but a period in history still remains for him a stretch of time limited by two dates, rather than a succession of years in which all mankind seems to be moving in the same direction, possessed of the same viewpoints, the same hopes and aspirations. The professor of English literature does not see that in teaching Hamlet he forsook his specialty, literature, for philology and mythology; that he turned his back on art and took up language structure. Thoroughness is not completeness, because the possession of the details of a subject does not necessarily bring with it a true comprehension of it. Add all the details, and the sum total is nothing more than the group of details. Thoroughness is a degree of comprehension resulting from the acquisition of new points of view. The teacher of history who sees underlying forces in the facts of the past, who understands that true inwardness of any movement which shows him its relation to all phases of life, but who nevertheless may not have ready command of all the specific details, is more thorough in his scholarship. He has the things that count; the facts that are forgotten can easily be found. The class that studies the dramatic structure of Hamlet, that sees Shakespeare's power of character portrayal, that takes up only such grammatical and language points as give clearer comprehension or lead to greater appreciation of diction, is thorough although it does not possess all the facts. It is thorough because what is significant and dynamic in Hamlet is made focal. The postgraduate student assiduously searching for data for his doctorate thesis is often guided by the erroneous conception of thoroughness; he wants facts that have never seen the light. The more he gets of these, the nearer he approaches his goal. He avoids conclusions; he is counseled by his professors against giving too much of his book to the expression of his views. Analyze the chapters of a doctorate thesis and note the number of pages given to facts and those to conclusions and interpretations. The proportion is astonishing. The student's power to find facts is clearly shown; his power to use facts is not revealed by his thesis. The richer the thesis is in detail, in references, in allusions to dusty tomes and original sources, the more thorough is it frequently considered by the faculty. We have failed to realize that this excessive zeal in gathering and collating a large number of not commonly known facts may make the thesis more cumbersome, more complete, but not necessarily more thorough. However, the plea for a new standard in judging doctorate theses is meeting with gratifying encouragement.
What, then, are the teaching practices that make for greater thoroughness, that increase the qualitative and intensive character of knowledge? We shall discuss some of these in the succeeding paragraphs.
How can thoroughness be produced?
The acquisition of new points of view makes for increased thoroughness of comprehension. The class that understands the causes of the American Revolution from the American point of view knows of the navigation laws, the quartering of soldiers in American homes, the Stamp Act, the Boston Massacre,—the usual provocations that strained patience to the breaking point. The college teacher of American history who spends time on the riots in New York in which a greater number of colonists was killed than in Boston, who teaches in detail the various acts forbidding the manufacture of hats and of iron ware, or the protests against English practices in the colonies made by British merchants, etc., is adding more facts, but he may only be intensifying the erroneous conclusion that the students have formed in earlier and less complete courses. The topic, "Causes of the American Revolution," grows in thoroughness, not through the addition of these facts but through the presentation of new interpretations of the practices of the English. When we explain that the English believed in virtual and not actual representation, the students see a new meaning in "taxation without representation." When the students learn that the English government decided on a new economic and industrial policy which planned to have the mother country specialize in manufacture and transportation and the colonies in production of raw materials, the students see reason, though not necessarily justice, in the acts prohibiting Americans from various forms of manufacture and transportational activities. These new facts modify in the minds of students the point of view so often given in elementary courses, that the War for Independence was caused by sheer British meanness and injustice, by her policy of reckless repression.