Thinking and learning to think, Nathan C. Schaeffer [each kindness read aloud txt] 📗
- Author: Nathan C. Schaeffer
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So essential to correct thinking is the development of the concepts and ideas which lie at the basis of each science, that we may designate the giving to the pupil of something to think about as the first and most important step in the solution of the educational problem before us. In other words, the furnishing of the proper materials of thought is the first step in teaching others to think. The force and the validity of this proposition are easily seen if we reflect upon the essential oneness of the manifold diversities of thinking as they appear at school and in subsequent years.
It is universally conceded that education should be a preparation for life. The thinking at school should be an adumbration of the thinking beyond the school. The possession of enough data, or thought-materials, for reaching trustworthy conclusions, which is the indispensable requisite of successful thinking at school, is likewise a necessary requisite of successful thinking in practical life. It behooves us to inquire into the nature and foundation of the thinking of men in the professions, and in other vocations, for the purpose of gaining further light upon the problem before us. Let us, then, inquire into the nature and foundation of the thinking of men eminent in a profession or prominent in some other vocation. The professional man may have less native ability, less general knowledge, less culture and education, less mental power than the client whom he advises or the patient for whom he prescribes; and yet his inferences and conclusions are accepted as more trustworthy than those of men outside of the given profession, because he has a knowledge of facts and data which they do not possess. If he be a physician, special training and professional experience have taught him how to observe the symptoms of different diseases; how to eliminate sources of doubt and error; how to reach a correct diagnosis of difficult cases, and how to apply the proper remedies. If he be a lawyer, he has been taught how to examine court records; how to detect and guard against flaws in legal documents; how to find and interpret the law in specific cases; how to protect the life and property of his client. The judge on the bench is learned in the law, though he may be ignorant of science, literature, agriculture, commerce, and manufactures. He is aided in arriving at correct conclusions by thought-materials which are not in the possession of laymen.
How does the thinking of an expert differ from that of other men? Not so much in the processes of thought as in the data upon which he reasons. An ordinary witness may testify as to matters of fact; the expert is supposed to possess extensive knowledge and superior discrimination in a particular branch of learning or practice; hence he may be a witness in matters as to which ordinary observers cannot form just conclusions, and he is held liable for negligence in case he injures another from want of proper qualifications or proper use of the thought-materials necessary to form trustworthy conclusions. From this point of view we can see new force and beauty in the remark of Fitch that teaching is the noblest of the professions, but the sorriest of trades. The aim of a trade is to make something that will sell; its ultimate aim is money, a livelihood. Teaching and the other professions, although they cannot be sundered from money-making, have a nobler aim. This arises out of the thought-materials with which they deal. If a teacher’s mind does not busy itself with these, he sinks to the level of a tradesman. A very keen observer said of the head of a large boarding-school, that he had learned his trade from the principal of a large normal school under whom he had been trained. The remark, if true, was severe, but significant. It was an intimation that the substance of the thinking of these two men was business rather than education; that their conversation about the quality of the beef and mutton served, about the loaves of bread, the pounds of butter, and the bushels of potatoes consumed each week, indicated that they were thinking more of the stomach and the purse than of the things of the mind; that their aim was a large attendance and a large cash-balance at the end of the year rather than the mental growth and professional preparation of their students. Their thinking was efficient and trustworthy in the domain in which it was exercised. It partook of the nature of trade-thinking, and lacked professional quality because it did not concern itself with problems of mental growth and moral training, with the proper sequence of studies, with the educational value of different kinds of knowledge, and with the best methods of economizing the time and effort of their students.
In several aspects teaching is like a trade. Every art has its mysteries, with which those who practise it must be familiar if they would succeed. Teaching is no exception; and if the annual institute or the school of pedagogy fails to clarify these mysteries by putting the teachers in possession of materials for thought and of methods of applying knowledge to beget thinking which are not within the ken of the average parent and the general public, then failure must be written over the outcome. A mystery is a lesson to be learned. A scrutiny of the mysteries which characterize every trade and every art will serve not merely to emphasize the necessity for furnishing proper thought-materials, but will be helpful also in paving the way for the consideration of another essential in training pupils to think. Let us view them in the concrete.
A machinist, who was also a skilled mechanic, was compelled by circumstances to quit his trade and to accept a position as janitor. One day the pipe leading from the sink to the sewer was clogged. The teacher, in conjunction with a carpenter, worked a long time to fix it, but in vain. The janitor was called, who in a few moments overcame the difficulty by the application of a principle in natural philosophy on which the teacher could have talked learnedly, although he knew not how to apply it in the given case. The janitor related how the foreman in a foundry was baffled in the effort to bore a hole through a piece of iron until a workman, trained under a foreign master, suggested the purchase of two things at a drug-store by means of which the hole was easily bored. When the druggist asked about the use that was to be made of these chemicals, he was told that the use was one of the mysteries of the machinist’s trade.
Next, the carpenter fixed the mortise lock of a door which needed attention, and the others lauded the skill with which he handled his tools and applied his knowledge. Before the three separated, the janitor’s son came with a word which he could not find in his lexicon. With the aid of chalk and black-board and grammar, the teacher showed how to dig out the roots of a Greek verb and what beautiful changes occur in its conjugation. The turn had come for the tradesmen to admire the mysterious skill and power of the teacher.
In applying the principle of natural philosophy, the janitor made skilful use of one or two tools which the teacher and the carpenter had never seen. He could express thought through the tools of his own handicraft, in ways that they could not. Each one of the three men knew the tools and the mysteries of his own vocation. During the entire scene there was not a logical flaw in the thinking of any one of them. Probably there was little difference in their native ability; certainly none in the fundamental nature of their thought-processes. The practical difference resulted from the data at their command and from the tools they were using to express the thoughts peculiar to their several vocations.
The power to use tools, instruments, and machinery lifts man above the brute creation. There is labor-saving machinery in thinking as well as in manual labor. The more perfect the tools with which we work the greater the results we can achieve without waste of effort. In thinking as well as in working we must use the best tools in order to attain the greatest facility and efficiency. Yonder are two wheat-fields. In one of them a giant is wielding the sickle of our forefathers; in the other a youth, not yet out of his teens, is at work. At the close of the day the work of the giant will not bear comparison with that of the lad, because the latter was sitting upon a self-binder. They had the same material to work upon, yet, in spite of his superior strength, the giant could not cope with his weaker though better-equipped competitor. In like manner, the youth who has mastered the algebraic equation, or the symbols and formulas of chemistry, is in many respects the superior of a much brighter man who is not in possession of these tools or instruments of thought. A boy of average capacity who goes through a good high school thereby acquires certain fundamental ideas and the accompanying instruments of thought by which he is enabled to solve problems entirely beyond the power of a much brighter boy who never studies beyond the grammar grade.
The instruments of thought are generally spoken of as symbols, whilst the materials of thought are the things for which the symbols stand. In thinking, the mind may employ the ideas which correspond to the things in the external world; or it may employ the symbols by which science indicates things that have been definitely fixed or quantified. Failure to distinguish the sign from the thing signified, the symbol from its reality, leads to confusion in thought and to the most disastrous results in mental development. Loss of appetite for knowledge must inevitably result from methods of teaching by which the pupil is expected to learn the sounds of the letters from their names, or musical sounds from the notation on the staff, or the ideas of number from the arabic notation, or a knowledge of flowers from the technical terms of a text-book, or a knowledge of chemical elements and substances from the definitions, descriptions, and formulas of a scientific treatise. The symbol is indispensable in advanced thinking; but to expect the learner to get the fundamental ideas of a science from words, symbols, and definitions is evidence that
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