Thinking and learning to think, Nathan C. Schaeffer [each kindness read aloud txt] 📗
- Author: Nathan C. Schaeffer
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The observation of a fact often stimulates thought in new directions. In fact, new sciences have arisen from accidental observations. “Erasmus Bartholinus thus first discovered double refraction in Iceland spar; Galvini noticed the twitching of a frog’s leg; Oken was struck by the form of a vertebra; Malus accidentally examined light reflected from a distant window with a double refracting substance; and Sir John Herschel’s attention was drawn to the peculiar appearance of a solution of quinine sulphate. In earlier times there must have been some one who first noticed the strange behavior of a loadstone, or the unaccountable motions produced by amber. As a general rule we shall not know in what direction to look for a great body of phenomena widely different from those familiar to us. Chance, then, must give us the starting-point; but one accidental observation well used may lead us to make thousands of observations in an intentional and organized manner, and thus a science may be gradually worked from the smallest opening.”[21]
In recent years experimental research has become a regular occupation in connection with large manufacturing establishments. In some factories along the Rhine upward of sixty men are employed in chemical experiments for the purpose of finding what use can be made of waste products. In this way over two hundred useful products from petroleum have been discovered, and a large increase in profits has been the result. The great electrical works spend time and money upon experiments, and jealously censor every article written by their employees for scientific journals lest their valuable secrets should be given away. A company engaged in the manufacture of cash registers offers a yearly premium for the most helpful suggestion from the men and women in its employ. In one year the firm received over eleven hundred suggestions, of which at least eight hundred were utilized in improvements of various kinds.
These instances are only samples of many that could be cited to show how systematic observation and experiment lend a helping hand to our national prosperity. Manufacturers carry them on for the sake of gain, the universities for the sake of widening the field of knowledge. To aid in such research large endowments have been established, and many of the common people willingly pay tax in support of State universities. Treatises on inductive logic and on the physical sciences have been prepared by Herschel, J. S. Mill, Jevons, and others for the purpose of showing the correct methods of research by the use of instruments of precision, of standards of measurement, and of other apparatus; for the laws of thought must be obeyed in the interpretation of natural phenomena. Although as a matter of discipline the teacher in our public schools may well study these advanced treatises, yet the habits of observation which the elementary school should aim to beget and to foster are simpler in detail, more easily acquired, and, it may be added, of inestimable value in the subsequent life of the pupils. Habits of observation are needed not only by authors, inventors, and scientists, but also by all other people for the interpretation of the books they may read and for the discharge of the daily duties devolving upon them. The engineer, the fireman, the conductor, the tradesman, the mechanic, the detective, the scout, the warrior, must be able to see things as they are or face partial failure. Too many of them have eyes and see not; they have ears and hear not. The study of nature is valuable as a preparation for life either in the country or in the city. Our rural population have not learned to see and appreciate the marvels in nature which are transpiring on every side. The way in which the almanac is consulted for signs to guide in sowing and planting, for prognostications of the weather, show how little the average man can make observations. The printers have found it necessary to retain these absolutely unreliable weather predictions in their almanacs; the attempted omission has been an experiment involving the loss of thousands of dollars. The success of the quack is largely due to limited observation. One cure is made much of while multitudes of failures are always forgotten.
Our rural population would be far more contented if the boys and girls were taught at school how to observe and appreciate their surroundings. They have many advantages over city folks which they never realize as sources of enjoyment. The senses themselves, which have been styled the gate-ways of knowledge, may be improved by judicious exercise; and the power of the mind to interpret sense-impressions may be developed to a marvellous degree. The savages of our North American forests had developed keen eyes and ears; the more civilized backwoodsmen were soon more than a match for the wily Indian. To-day, when the latter watches the trained sharp-shooters hitting with unerring accuracy a mark more than half a mile distant, he shakes his head and walks away in silence.
It has been asserted that a child gains more knowledge in the first seven years of its life than in all its subsequent days. If the domain of abstract and scientific knowledge be excluded from the comparison, this is probably true. At any rate, if the thinking which is based upon the knowledge of facts thus gained is to be correct, the facts must be correctly observed.
Observation is thus of prime importance, not merely as furnishing a stimulus to thought, but also as supplying abundant materials of thought. Travel, experience, experiment, as well as the ordinary course of natural phenomena, furnish abundant opportunity for the formation of correct habits of observation. The observations thus made should be recorded in the memory, if not on manuscript. From the storehouse of the memory, thus filled with materials for thought, the mind derives many of the best data for reaching conclusions. Observation, experience, and reading, as sources of thought-material, presuppose an accurate and retentive memory in those who think well and act well. The relation of memory to thinking deserves treatment in a separate chapter.
There is a limit to the number of observations which the mind can carry and use. Nature-study may be overdone. Mere seeing is not thinking. What the eye beholds must be sorted and assigned to its appropriate class; otherwise the treasure-house of memory will soon resemble a wilderness of meaningless facts. Than this only one thing can be worse,—namely, a wilderness of meaningless words.
Reading is a species of observation. An exercise in oral reading, during which each pupil is called down as soon as he miscalls a word, is often an astonishing revelation, showing how few of the advanced pupils can accurately see and correctly name every word in a stanza or paragraph. Methods of teaching a beginner to read are correct in seeking to develop the ability to pronounce words without help from others. Faulty application of a method that is right in this respect may seriously retard, and even destroy, the power of thinking what is on the printed page. What on earth is a first-year pupil to do with the many hundred words which he is sometimes taught to pronounce? Often words are arranged in sentences which come dangerously near the slang of the slums, and which no child ever hears in a cultured home. Furthermore, some sentences in primers and first readers are well-nigh void of meaning, the aim being to teach the words for the sake of the combinations of letters which they contain. The first test to apply to a method of teaching a beginner to read is the question, How quickly does it teach that which must be known as a condition of pronouncing new words,—namely, the shape and the sound or sounds of each of the letters of the alphabet? As compared with the sound and the shape, the name of the letter is of relatively little importance. Students of Hebrew may read that language fluently without being able to repeat the Hebrew alphabet, the names of the letters being a mere matter of convenience in talking about them. The second great test to be applied to the method of teaching a beginner to read is the question, Does it form the habit of getting thought from the printed page? Grown men have admitted that they passed through several readers before they discovered that there was a meaning or connected story in the words which they were pronouncing. They saw and gave names to words very much as people see and give names to objects round about them without recognizing the significance of what is seen, or thinking the thoughts which the Author of the Universe has spread out before them in the great book of nature.
The third test to be applied to the method of teaching reading is the question, Does it save the pupil from the unnatural tones of the school-room by training him to use his voice in the right way? To this test reference will be made later.
If observation is to have abiding value, it must lead to thinking. This is as true of the observation of words and sentences on the printed or written page as it is of the observation of earth and sky and sea, of the starry heavens above and the moral law within (which filled the soul of the philosopher Kant with never-ceasing awe). How the things obtained from books and from the world outside are appropriated in thought and made our own will appear more fully when we discuss the relation of memory to thinking.
XITHE MEMORY AND THINKING
Overburden not thy memory to make so faithful a servant a slave. Remember Atlas was weary. Have as much reason as a camel, to rise when thou hast thy full load. Memory, like a purse, if it be overfull that it cannot shut, all will drop out of it: take heed of a gluttonous curiosity to feed on many things, lest the greediness of the appetite of thy memory spoil the digestion thereof.
Thomas Fuller.
To impose on a child to get by heart a long scroll of phrases without any ideas is a practice fitter for a jackdaw than for anything that wears the shape of man.
Dr. I. Watts.
The habit of laying up in the memory what has not been digested by the understanding is at once the cause and the effect of mental weakness.
Sir W. Hamilton.
There is no one department of educational work in which the difference between skilled and unskilled teaching is so manifest as in the view which is taken of the faculty of memory, the mode of training it, and the uses to which different teachers seek to put it.
Fitch.
XITHE MEMORY AND THINKING
Many people freely admit that they have a poor memory. Their misstatements, breaches of etiquette, and failure to keep engagements they excuse by claiming a poor memory for dates, names, faces, facts, and the like. Accuse them of possessing poor judgment, and they are very much offended. They fail to see the close relation between a good memory and good judgment, between an accurate memory and sound common sense, which is but another name for good judgment in matters that all men have in common. Judgment affirms the agreement or disagreement between two objects of thought. It involves comparison. How can the comparison be accurate if the memory is not accurate
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