Thinking and learning to think, Nathan C. Schaeffer [each kindness read aloud txt] 📗
- Author: Nathan C. Schaeffer
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This stimulus to thought is employed by every master in the art of teaching. The question may be used to badger and confuse a pupil, especially if the teacher is not fully acquainted with the ideas and thoughts already in the learner’s mind. To cause each pupil to place side by side in his mind ideas and concepts whose relation he had not before perceived, it is necessary that the teacher be familiar with the intellectual storehouse of every member of the class. At this point the substitutes who occasionally supply the places of regular teachers are at a serious disadvantage. Not knowing what the pupils have mastered, they must often waste time in finding out where the new should be linked to the old, and where it is necessary to clarify and develop ideas with which the members of the class are only partially familiar. Often these lose interest in the recitation while the new teacher quizzes them on things that have grown stale by repetition.
Back of the Socratic method must be a Socrates to ask the questions. Education results not from highly differentiated methods, but primarily from the play of mind upon mind, heart upon heart, will upon will. In the difficult art of making others think the most important factor is the teacher himself. Thinking begets thinking. In this connection one cannot forbear contrasting the living teacher with other educational forces. Treatises on education are in the habit of printing nature with a capital letter, whilst words like teacher, humanity, unless they stand at the beginning of the sentence, begin with a small letter. Are lifeless rocks, dead leaves, stuffed birds, and transfixed bugs more potent in begetting thought than the teacher himself? If nature were such a wonderful teacher, then the savage, who is in daily contact with nature, and who knows little or nothing of the artificial life of our great cities and great seats of learning, should be the best thinker. A teacher whose power to stimulate thought is not superior to dead leaves and bugs and butterflies must have reached the dead line. Teachers may be divided into two classes,—those who have ceased to grow and those who are still alive and growing. Under the tuition of the former the boy soon loses interest in study, and seldom acquires the power to think. From a dead tree you cannot propagate life. Ingraft a lifeless teacher upon the school; the most skilful devices of school management and recitation serve only to intensify the dull routine, the mechanical iteration and repetition which Bishop Spalding declares to be the most radical defect in our systems of education. It takes life to beget life. A growing mind is required to beget growth in other minds. A good thinker begets habits of close and careful thinking in those whom he moulds. Some minds are more gifted in this respect than others. Without doubt the reader can recall the difference between knowledge and teaching power which he felt while under several instructors at the same time. From those gifted with stimulating power he came away with a mind full of interrogation points, and with the attention riveted upon problems calling for investigation. Under their tuition the commonest things acquired new interest and became food for thought. The thinking seemed to spring out of that upon which the mind was feeding. Without the stimulating influence which comes from a live teacher, contact with nature, access to libraries and laboratories, may amount to very little. The chief trouble in our schools is not that the courses of study are too crowded, but the teachers are too empty. There is not enough fuel in their minds to keep alive the glow of thought. A course of study in the hands of a skilful instructor is like a good bill of fare under the direction of a skilful caterer. The latter does not expect every guest to eat his way through the entire bill of fare; he so manages the succession of dishes as to stimulate the appetite to the end of the feast; he sends the guests away without the feeling of satiety,—in fact, anxious for the next banquet. The wise teacher does not expect the pupils to assimilate everything in the course of study; he aims so to feed and stimulate their minds that they find genuine pleasure in thinking, and go away from him with a desire not only for more knowledge, but also for things that give suitable exercise to the reflective powers. Watch a boy at work upon a puzzle, and you will be convinced that he finds genuine delight in thinking that which is difficult. The most popular teachers are not they who smooth away every difficulty in the pathway of the student, but they who stimulate his thinking and help him to a sense of mastery over intellectual difficulties. The quickening, stimulative influence of the Socratic question lies in its content rather than its form; and both form and content derive their vivifying power from the personality of the teacher.
The stimulating influences which go forth from a live teacher are partly conscious and partly unconscious. The latter are the more effective. Minds gifted with quickening power create about themselves an intellectual atmosphere that is like the invigorating atmosphere of the mountains or the tonic breezes which blow from the sea. The woman who touched the hem of the Saviour’s garment felt at once the vivifying influences which were all the time going forth from the Great Teacher. Here we stand face to face with the greatest mystery of the teacher’s art.
Some light is shed upon the mystery by the intimate relation which exists between the conscious and the subconscious life of the soul. The ideas upon any subject which the individual cherishes during his conscious moments, the train of logical thinking which he pursues when the will gives direction to reflection, the creative effort which he seeks to put forth in a given direction,—these shape the activities which go forward in the depths of the soul when perhaps the attention is directed to the discharge of routine duties. “Out of the heart are the issues of life.” “Out of the fulness of the heart the mouth speaketh.” From the treasure-house of the heart come welling up thoughts, ideas, sentiments, and purposes which largely determine the influence exerted upon others when the individual is not aware of it. The teacher must make himself what he wishes his pupil to be. If foot-ball and base-ball and boating form the staple of his thinking, the centre of his affections, these athletic sports, in ways that are marvellous and often past finding out, become the objects of thought in which his students will delight. If the truths and principles of science absorb his interest and engage the best thought of his conscious hours, these will determine the moulding influence which he will unconsciously exert upon others. If he delights in germ-ideas, in seed-thoughts, these will emanate from him whenever he is thrown into contact with inquiring minds. Much, of course, is due to native ability, to inherited qualities. The circle of minds which one teacher can reach is further limited by the breadth or narrowness of his views, by the points which he has in common with others, by the amount of sympathetic interest which he manifests in their progress and welfare, by the sum total of the characteristics of generic humanity which he has taken up into himself. In other words, his stimulating power depends upon the extent to which his inner life is representative of the best thought and the best traits of the age in which he lives and of the people to whom he belongs.
A teacher may destroy his power to awaken and stimulate thought by developing every subject in all its bearings to its logical or final conclusion. He should send his classes away from the daily lecture or recitation to the library or the laboratory, to the study, the shop, or the field, with the sense of something to be achieved, with the feeling that there are fields of research for them to explore, fields that will amply repay careful study, investigation, and reflection. There is nothing that tires a boy so soon as the feeling that there is nothing for him to do, nothing that he can master, achieve, or conquer on his own account. The normal child is so constituted that it loves activity, looks into the future, and regards itself as an important factor in the world’s life. The advance from childhood to youth is marked by a transition into the period that is brimful of hope and ambition. The pampered son of a rich man may feel no longing of this sort; his opportunities for early travel and premature indulgence in every whim may have brought him to the point where the whole world seems like a sucked orange for which one has no further use. Unless the rich father and mother possess an extraordinary amount of good sense, their children do not have an even chance with the children of the middle classes whose outlook upon life supplies abundant motives for study and exertion.
If a boy has not made a mistake in selecting his parents, if the atmosphere of the home in which his first six years are spent is normal, he comes to school with a sense of something to be achieved. Should this feeling be lacking, the true teacher will aim to beget it by the instruction he gives and by appeals to the innate desire for knowledge.
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