“Why is not that a good way?” I said. “It certainly brings results. The pupil gets on rapidly. He learns a lesson before he knows it.”
“He never does know it,” growled Scholasticus. “And what’s worse, he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know it. By this painless method he has never been compelled to charge his mind with it and to reason it out. And besides, it’s death on the teacher. Ezekiel Cheever taught that Boston Latin School till he was over ninety years old, and never had a touch of nervous prostration. He didn’t have to lie awake planning how to hold the rapt attention of his pupils. If there was any chance of the grammar rules not being learned, he let them do the worrying. It was good for them. There was a race of sturdy thinkers in those days. They knew how to deal with knotty problems. If they survived the school, they could not be downed in the town meeting.”
“Scholasticus,” I said, “I don’t like the way you talk. The trouble with you is that you took your education too hard. I fancy that I see every lesson you ever learned sticking out of your consciousness like the piles of stones in a New Hampshire pasture. They are monuments of industry, but they lack a certain suavity. You are doing what most Americans do,—whenever they find anything wrong they lay the blame on the public schools. Just because some of the younger men at your club argue somewhat erratically, you blame the whole modern system of education. It’s a way you clever people have,—you are not content with one good and sufficient reason for your statement of fact. You must reinforce it by another of a more general character. It makes me feel as I do when, a faucet needing a new washer, I send for a plumber,—and behold twain! One would be enough, if he would attend strictly to business. Every system has its failures. If that of the present day seems to have more than its share, it is because its failures are still in evidence, while those of your generation are mostly forgotten. Oblivion is a deft housemaid, who tidies up the chambers of the Past, by sweeping all the dust into the dark corners. On the other hand, you drop into the Present amid the disorder of the spring cleaning, when everything is out on the line. If you could recall the shining lights in your Logic class, you might admit that some of them had the form of reasoning without the power thereof. It was in your day, wasn’t it, that the criticism was made on the undergraduate thesis:—
Although he wrote it all by rote,
He did not write it right.
I couldn’t help thinking of those lines when I was listening just now to your reasoning. The real point, Scholasticus, is this, which seems to have escaped you. You talk of the laws of the mind. When you were in college it seemed a very simple thing to formulate these laws. There was no Child Psychology, giving way before you knew it to Adolescence, where everything was quite different. There was no talk about subliminal consciousness, where you couldn’t tell which was consciousness and which was something else. The mind in your day came in one standard size.”
“Yes,” said Scholasticus, “when we were in the Academy, we had Watts on the Mind. Watts treated his subject in a straightforward way; he had nothing about nervous reactions; he gave us plain Mind. When we got into college we had Locke on the Understanding. When it was time to take account of conscience, we had Paley’s ‘Moral Science.’ This, with the ‘Evidences,’ made a pretty good preparation for life.”
“So it did,” I said, “and you have done credit to your training. But since that time Psychologists have made a number of discoveries which render it necessary to revise the old methods.”
Seeing that he, for the first time, was giving me his attention, I thought that it might be possible to win him away from that futile and acrid criticism of the present course of events, which is the besetting sin of men of his age, to the more fruitful criticism by creation.
“Scholasticus,” I said, “here is your opportunity. You complain that Logic is going out. The trouble is that it has been taught in an antiquated way. The logicians followed the analogy of mathematics. They invented all sorts of formal figures and diagrams, and were painfully abstract. When you were learning to reason, you had to commit to memory a formula like this: ‘Every y is x; every z is y; therefore every z is x. E.g., let the major term (which is represented by x) be “One who possesses all virtue,” the minor term (z) “Every man who possesses one virtue,” and the middle term (y) “Every man who possesses prudence,” and you have the celebrated argument of Aristotle that “the virtues are inseparable.”’