Thinking and learning to think, Nathan C. Schaeffer [each kindness read aloud txt] 📗
- Author: Nathan C. Schaeffer
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“If a person finds himself forgetful of names, it is a health-giving process to take a certain portion of time in committing to memory words. If this is done by committing new masterpieces of poetry and prose, or in committing to memory the words of a new language, there is profit or gain to the thinking powers, as well as to the memory. Doubtless the cultivation of verbal memory, building up, as it does, a certain convolution in the brain, has a tendency to prevent atrophy in that organ. This contains a hint in the direction of keeping up in the later part of life the faculties which are usually so active in youth. The tendency is to neglect childish faculties and allow them to become torpid. But if this is liable to weaken certain portions of the brain in such a way as to induce hemorrhage, ending in softening of the brain, certainly the memory should be cultivated, if only for the health of the brain, and the memory for mechanical items of detail should be cultivated on grounds of health as well as on grounds of culture. The extreme advocates of the rational method of teaching are perhaps wrong in repudiating entirely all mechanical memory of dates and names or items. Certainly they are right in opposing the extremes of the old pedagogy, which obliged the pupils to memorize, page after page, the contents of a grammar verbatim et literatim et punctuatim (as, for instance, the graduates of the Boston Latin School tell us was the custom early in this century). But is there not a middle ground? Is there not a minimum list of details, of dates and names which must and should be memorized, both on account of the health of the nervous system and on account of the intrinsic usefulness of the data themselves? And must not the person in later life continue to exercise these classes of memory which deal with details for the sake of physical health? This is a question for the educational pathologist.”[23]
A teacher of Hebrew spent one-fourth of his time in drill on Hebrew roots and their meaning. His students groaned under the drudgery imposed. At the end of the first six chapters of Genesis, he surprised his class by the announcement, “Now you know half the words in the Hebrew Bible.” He had selected words used five hundred times, then words used three hundred times, and drilled on these in various ways until he had fixed all the words in most frequent use in the Hebrew text. It was a great saving of time in the end, and a great step towards reading at sight the Old Testament in the original. By the modern short-cuts to knowledge the pupils are hurried from one classic author to another, and hence they never master the vocabulary to the extent of reading Latin or Greek at sight. A little less haste at the start, and a little more drill for the purpose of fixing new words as they come up, thus avoiding the everlasting turning to the lexicon for more than half the words in a lesson, would facilitate progress and enable the student to find some pleasure in the study of foreign languages.
An old teacher of Latin, who had discovered this secret in the acquisition of a foreign tongue, agreed to take a small class in Livy on condition that the students write in a special blank-book and review every day all the words whose meaning they were required to hunt in the lexicon. At the end of ten weeks half the class read two pages without looking up more than two words. Their study of Latin not only gave them a sense of pleasure, but, in thinking the thoughts of the author through the medium of the eye-symbols and then putting them into good English, they acquired excellent thought-material, an extensive vocabulary, and superior skill in syntactical construction. It proved a most valuable exercise in thinking and in the expression of thought.
Valuable as the mechanical memory is for the purpose of furnishing the thought-instruments, it sinks into comparative insignificance alongside of the logical memory. The latter is the memory for ideas, binding them by associations based on cause and effect, reason and consequence, similarity and contrast, the general and the particular. It is the kind of memory by which the mind carries a knowledge of the laws of science, the principles of art, the salient points of a discourse, the train of ideas in a book, the leading thoughts in a system of philosophy. It converts history and geography from a dry collection of facts, dates, and names into a living organism whose parts are internally related by a plastic principle, and combined into a whole that has order and system in every detail. How much better that a pupil’s knowledge of history and geography should be thus systematized than that it should resemble a wilderness of facts! As a means for furnishing thought-material, the logical memory is far more valuable than the memory which holds words and things by the accidental ties of sound, sight, and fanciful relations.
A classification of the forms of memory into portative, analytical, and assimilative, given in Latham’s book on the “Action of Examinations,” is helpful in determining the relation of memory to thinking.
The portative memory simply conveys matter. “Its only aim, like that of a carrier, is to deliver the parcel as it was received.” It is the form of memory that enables some people to carry the contents of entire volumes in their minds, sometimes in the very words, oftener in ideas only. The rhapsodists in ancient Greece who could repeat entire books of Homer are examples in point. Some men of superior talent have possessed this power in an eminent degree. Macaulay, on a voyage across the Irish Channel, rehearsed from memory an entire book of Virgil’s “Æneid.” It is the kind of memory that shines at examinations and excites the envy of persons less gifted with powers of retention. It may easily be degraded into a slave, doing work which should be performed by higher mental powers. Hence it has been appropriately styled the Cinderella faculty of the mind. Like the girl in the story, it may be abused dreadfully by having all sorts of useless drudgery heaped upon it. To require a child to learn the five thousand isolated facts formerly scattered through treatises on geography was an exercise as useless as the picking of the lentils which were poured into the ashes to give Cinderella something to do, and, unfortunately, there is no bird from fairyland to assist in the accomplishment of the task.
Much as we may admire the power of Thomas Fuller, who could repeat five hundred unrelated words in foreign languages after hearing them twice, it is an accomplishment not worth acquiring. As an accomplishment it recalls the king to whom a man exhibited his skill in throwing a pea so that it would stick on the end of a pin,—a feat acquired after years of patient practice. The man hoped to get a valuable present for his exhibition of skill. The king ordered a bag of pease to be given him, saying that it was all his accomplishment was worth.
There is no end of warnings as to the possible evil effects of a good memory upon the power to think,—warnings that a teacher may take to heart with advantage to himself and others.
Dr. Carpenter asserts that when the form of memory by which children learn a piece of poetry whose meaning they do not comprehend exists in unusual strength, it seems to impede rather than aid the formation of the nexus of associations which makes acquired knowledge a part of the mind itself. In illustration, he cites the suggestive case of Dr. Leyden, “who was distinguished for his extraordinary gift of learning languages, and who could repeat long acts of Parliament, or any similar document, after having once read it. Being congratulated by a friend on his remarkable gift, he replied that, instead of being an advantage to him, it was often a source of great inconvenience, because, when he wished to recollect anything in a document he had read, he could only do it by repeating the whole from the commencement till he reached the point he wished to recall.”
Latham has well said, “The ready mechanical memory of a youth, besides enabling him to mislead unpractised examiners, makes him deceive himself. Teachers find that a very ready memory is a bad educator; it stunts the growth of other mental powers by doing their work for them. A youth who can recollect without trouble will, as it were, mask the difficulty in his classical author or his mathematics by learning by rote what stands in his translation or text-book, and march forward without more ado. Thus a quick memory involves a temptation which may enervate its possessor by suffering him to evade a difficulty instead of bracing himself to encounter it in front.”[24]
Maudsley writes in the same strain: “This kind of memory, in which the person seems to read a photographic copy of former impressions with his mind’s eye, is not, indeed, commonly associated with high intellectual power; for what reason I know not, unless it be that the mind, to which it belongs, is prevented, by the very excellence of its power of apprehending and recalling separate facts, from rising to that discernment of their relations which is involved in reasoning and judgment, and so stays in a function which should be the foundation of further development, or that, being by some natural defect prevented from rising to the higher sphere of a comprehension of relations, it applies all its energies to a comprehension of details. Certainly one runs the risk, by overloading the memory of a child with details, of arresting the development of the mental powers of the child; stereotyping details on the brain, we prevent that further development of it which consists in rising from concrete conceptions to the conception of relations.”[25]
Here is another warning from the pen of Archbishop Whately:
“Some people have been intellectually damaged by having what is called a good memory. An unskilful teacher is content to put before children all they ought to learn, and to take care that they remember it; and so, though the memory is retentive, the mind is left in a passive state, and men wonder that he who was so quick at learning and remembering should not be an able man, which is as reasonable as to wonder that a cistern if filled should not be a perpetual fountain. Many men are saved by their deficiency of memory from being spoiled by an education; for those who have no extraordinary memory are driven to supply its place by thinking. If they do not remember a mathematical demonstration, they are driven to devise one. If they do not remember what Aristotle or Bacon said, they are driven to consider what they are likely to have said or ought to have said.”[26]
In his letter to a student who lamented his defective memory, P. C. Hamerton says that, so far from writing, as might be expected, a letter of condolence on a miserable memory, he felt disposed to write a letter of congratulation. “It is possible that you may be blessed with
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