Thinking and learning to think, Nathan C. Schaeffer [each kindness read aloud txt] 📗
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William James.
XXTHINKING AND DOING
The best methods of instruction in the ordinary school aim at the expression of thought in language. If a thing has been well said, the teacher and the examiner are apt to make no further inquiries. Although the expression of thought in written or spoken language is a species of doing, there is often a wide chasm between getting a thing said and having it done. Many of the reforms and revolutions thought out by university professors never get beyond the room in which they lecture or the page on which they formulate their ideas. The freedom of speech in the universities never troubles a despotic government until the ideas of the professors and students show signs of passing into the life of the nation. The difference between speech and action, between the man of words and the man of deeds, has long been felt and emphasized. The favorite method of teaching by lectures, and requiring the pupil to take notes, fails utterly if it stops with mere telling how a thing is to be done, and is not followed by actual doing on the part of the learner. Work in the shop, in the field, and in the factory often proves more effective in fitting a boy to earn a living than the theoretical instruction of the schools. The advantage of doing over telling as a means of learning has led to the formulation of the maxim, “We learn to do by doing,” and some educational reformers have announced the maxim as a principle of education universal in its application. Hence it is worth while to clarify its meaning and to ascertain its limitations. In so doing, we shall get a glimpse of the true relation between thinking and doing.
A young man possessed of unbounded faith in this maxim came to town for the purpose of practising medicine and surgery. He announced that if any persons got sick he proposed to give them medicine in the hope of learning the physiological and therapeutic effects of the various drugs. If any limbs were to be amputated, he was willing to try his hand, in the hope of ultimately learning how to perform surgical operations. He was too simple to succeed as a quack. He did not get a single patient; the people wisely gave him no opportunity of learning to do by doing.
Equally foolish were it thus to apply the maxim to any of the other professions. Would you, with life or property at stake, allow a novice to plead your cause at court in order that he might learn to plead by pleading? Who would waste the golden Sabbath hours in listening to one who was trying to learn to preach by preaching? The civilized world regards knowledge, which is the product of the act of learning, as the indispensable guide of those who offer their services at the bar, from the pulpit, or in the sick-room. When a Yale professor was asked whether study was required of those divinely called to preach, he replied that he had read of but one instance in which the Lord condescended to speak through the mouth of an ass.
Even an ass may learn to do some things by continually doing them in a blind way, and that, too, in spite of his proverbial stubbornness; but such learning by blind practice is unworthy of the school-life of a being gifted with human intelligence, and capable, it may be, of filling a profession. Instinct may guide a bee or a beaver: but knowledge should guide man in the arts and habits which he acquires. This fact is not ignored in the maxim as originally given by Comenius. “Things to be done should be learned by doing them. Mechanics understand this well: they do not give the apprentice a lecture upon their trade, but they will let him see how they, as masters, do; then they place the tool in his hands, teach him to use it and imitate them. Doing can be learned only by doing, writing by writing, painting by painting, and so on.” There is in this statement a clear recognition, on the one hand, of the knowledge-getting which precedes and accompanies all intelligent doing, and, on the other, of the practice which is needful for the attainment of skill. The master mechanic seeks first to give his apprentice a clear concept of what is to be done; and the knowledge thus acquired through the eye, and perhaps partly through hearing directions and explanations, is afterwards put into practice by the actual manipulation of tools and materials. If the maxim had been allowed to stand in this, its original form and meaning, no one could have objected to its use and application. But when the attempt was made to elevate it into a principle of binding force for all teaching; when, furthermore, the form was shortened so as to widen the meaning, and the maxim was then applied to regulate the acquisition of every form of human activity, both physical and mental, it is not surprising that protests were heard, and the necessity was felt of investigating the maxim for the purpose of ascertaining its limitations and defining its meaning.
Yet we must not fail to make grateful acknowledgment of the services to education rendered by those who lifted the maxim into prominence. How often were pupils expected to learn one thing by doing another. Drawing was advocated because it would improve the penmanship. Silent reading or thought-getting was to be learned by oral reading or thought-giving. The alphabet was taught as if the names of the letters would make the child familiar with the sounds. The idea of number was to be gotten by naming the numbers or imitating the Arabic notation. Facility and accuracy in the use of language were to be acquired from exercises in parsing and analysis. Familiarity with birds, flowers, minerals, chemicals, etc., was to be gained from the learned phraseology of the text-books. Sometimes even the teachers knew very little more than the technical terms. When the great ornithologist, Wilson, visited Princeton College, the professor of natural history scarcely knew a sparrow from a woodpecker. A great change has come over Princeton and all other higher institutions of learning; and the new influence has been felt in our high schools, and even in the grades below.
Whilst cheerfully acknowledging the value of the maxim of Comenius, we should, nevertheless, insist on the difference between a maxim which may regulate our conduct in specific cases and a principle which is an all-controlling guide in operations. Coleridge says, “A maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is speculative; a principle has truth in itself, and is prospective.” It is always dangerous to generalize upon facts observed in one realm of investigation, and then to allow others to apply these general statements to realms as diverse from the original field of observation as mind or spirit is from matter. The disciples in such cases always manifest the hidden weaknesses in the system of their master. They rush in where he would have feared to tread. They push his language to extremes, from which his deeper insight, broader vision, and larger experience would have caused him to shrink. Comenius framed the maxim from the observation of bodily acts; some seek to apply it to every form of human activity. The original language has been twisted into a statement that sounds paradoxical. “We learn to do by doing.” What can these words mean? If we can do a given thing, what need is there of learning to do that thing. If we cannot do the thing to be learned by the doing of it, how can any doing on our part issue in learning? Evidently the maxim in its modern form, if it is at all valid, must partake of the nature of a paradox, which, though seemingly absurd, is yet true in essence or fact. For the purpose of testing the validity of a paradoxical statement, there is no better way than to ascertain its possible meanings, to eliminate those evidently not intended, and finally to investigate the one or more senses or interpretations that may legitimately be put upon the language. The investigation will, in this instance, reveal the relation existing between doing and the act of learning.
In the first place, the maxim cannot mean that we learn to do by every kind of doing. The kind of doing by which the young man hoped to learn medicine and surgery was ridiculed centuries ago; no one in our day would advocate mere blind doing as a means of learning. The maxim must refer to doing guided by an intelligent will. The doing must be guided by thinking that is based upon correct and reliable data or premises.
Again, the maxim cannot mean that we learn one thing by doing another. The maxim was emphasized in protest against the absurdity of some of our methods of teaching. It may happen that the learner accidentally discovers one thing while seeking to find out some other thing; to expect that this shall always be the case is to invite disappointment. For instance, pupils do not learn to spell while studying books if attention is absorbed in the meaning, and is not drawn, in separate exercises, to the correct orthography of words that are apt to be misspelled.
There is a third limitation to the maxim on the side of attention. How, for instance, is the art of writing acquired? It is undoubtedly true that a boy cannot learn to write without himself writing; it is equally true that he is not always learning or improving in penmanship while he is practising with his pen upon paper. From the teacher or the copy he gets a concept of the letters to be made. The first efforts at imitation are fraught with defects. The pupil must clearly recognize wherein he failed, and earnestly strive to remedy the defects, if the next attempt is to be an improvement. The maxim, if here applied, must mean that the pupil learns to do by continually doing, as nearly as he can, the thing to be done. With each step of progress, his concept of the form of the letters and how to make them becomes
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