This distinction of the practical and social from the intellectual use

of language throws much light on the problem of the school in respect to

speech. That problem is _to direct pupils' oral and written speech, used

primarily for practical and social ends, so that gradually it shall

become a conscious tool of conveying knowledge and assisting thought_.

How without checking the spontaneous, natural motives--motives to which

language owes its vitality, force, vividness, and variety--are we to

modify speech habits so as to render them accurate and flexible

_intellectual_ instruments? It is comparatively easy to encourage the

original spontaneous flow and not make language over into a servant of

reflective thought; it is comparatively easy to check and almost

destroy (so far as the schoolroom is concerned) native aim and interest,

and to set up artificial and formal modes of expression in some isolated

and technical matters. The difficulty lies in making over habits that

have to do with "ordinary affairs and conveniences" into habits

concerned with "precise notions." The successful accomplishing of the

transformation requires (_i_) enlargement of the pupil's vocabulary;

(_ii_) rendering its terms more precise and accurate, and (_iii_)

formation of habits of consecutive discourse.

[Sidenote: To enlarge vocabulary, the fund of concepts should be

enlarged]

(_i_) Enlargement of vocabulary. This takes place, of course, by wider

intelligent contact with things and persons, and also vicariously, by

gathering the meanings of words from the context in which they are heard

or read. To grasp by either method a word in its meaning is to exercise

intelligence, to perform an act of intelligent selection or analysis,

and it is also to widen the fund of meanings or concepts readily

available in further intellectual enterprises (_ante_, p. 126). It is

usual to distinguish between one's active and one's passive vocabulary,

the latter being composed of the words that are understood when they are

heard or seen, the former of words that are used intelligently. The fact

that the passive vocabulary is ordinarily much larger than the active

indicates a certain amount of inert energy, of power not freely

controlled by an individual. Failure to use meanings that are

nevertheless understood reveals dependence upon external stimulus, and

lack of intellectual initiative. This mental laziness is to some extent

an artificial product of education. Small children usually attempt to

put to use every new word they get hold of, but when they learn to read

they are introduced to a large variety of terms that there is no

ordinary opportunity to use. The result is a kind of mental

suppression, if not smothering. Moreover, the meaning of words not

actively used in building up and conveying ideas is never quite

clear-cut or complete.

[Sidenote: Looseness of thinking accompanies a limited vocabulary]

While a limited vocabulary may be due to a limited range of experience,

to a sphere of contact with persons and things so narrow as not to

suggest or require a full store of words, it is also due to carelessness

and vagueness. A happy-go-lucky frame of mind makes the individual

averse to clear discriminations, either in perception or in his own

speech. Words are used loosely in an indeterminate kind of reference to

things, and the mind approaches a condition where practically everything

is just a thing-um-bob or a what-do-you-call-it. Paucity of vocabulary

on the part of those with whom the child associates, triviality and

meagerness in the child's reading matter (as frequently even in his

school readers and text-books), tend to shut down the area of mental

vision.

[Sidenote: Command of language involves command of things]

We must note also the great difference between flow of words and command

of language. Volubility is not necessarily a sign of a large vocabulary;

much talking or even ready speech is quite compatible with moving round

and round in a circle of moderate radius. Most schoolrooms suffer from a

lack of materials and appliances save perhaps books--and even these are

"written down" to the supposed capacity, or incapacity, of children.

Occasion and demand for an enriched vocabulary are accordingly

restricted. The vocabulary of things studied in the schoolroom is very

largely isolated; it does not link itself organically to the range of

the ideas and words that are in vogue outside the school. Hence the

enlargement that takes place is often nominal, adding to the inert,

rather than to the active, fund of meanings and terms.

(_ii_) Accuracy of vocabulary. One way in which the fund of words and

concepts is increased is by discovering and naming shades of

meaning--that is to say, by making the vocabulary more precise. Increase

in definiteness is as important relatively as is the enlargement of the

capital stock absolutely.

[Sidenote: The _general_ as the vague and as the distinctly generic]

The first meanings of terms, since they are due to superficial

acquaintance with things, are general in the sense of being vague. The

little child calls all men papa; acquainted with a dog, he may call the

first horse he sees a big dog. Differences of quantity and intensity are

noted, but the fundamental meaning is so vague that it covers things

that are far apart. To many persons trees are just trees, being

discriminated only into deciduous trees and evergreens, with perhaps

recognition of one or two kinds of each. Such vagueness tends to persist

and to become a barrier to the advance of thinking. Terms that are

miscellaneous in scope are clumsy tools at best; in addition they are

frequently treacherous, for their ambiguous reference causes us to

confuse things that should be distinguished.

[Sidenote: Twofold growth of words in sense or signification]

The growth of precise terms out of original vagueness takes place

normally in two directions: toward words that stand for relationships

and words that stand for highly individualized traits (compare what was

said about the development of meanings, p. 122); the first being

associated with abstract, the second with concrete, thinking. Some

Australian tribes are said to have no words for _animal_ or for _plant_,

while they have specific names for every variety of plant and animal in

their neighborhoods. This minuteness of vocabulary represents progress

toward definiteness, but in a one-sided way. Specific properties are

distinguished, but not relationships.[28] On the other hand, students of

philosophy and of the general aspects of natural and social science are

apt to acquire a store of terms that signify relations without balancing

them up with terms that designate specific individuals and traits. The

ordinary use of such terms as _causation_, _law_, _society_,

_individual_, _capital_, illustrates this tendency.

[28] The term _general_ is itself an ambiguous term, meaning (in its

best logical sense) the related and also (in its natural usage) the

indefinite, the vague. _General_, in the first sense, denotes the

discrimination of a principle or generic relation; in the second

sense, it denotes the absence of discrimination of specific or

individual properties.

[Sidenote: Words alter their meanings so as to change their logical

functions]

In the history of language we find both aspects of the growth of

vocabulary illustrated by changes in the sense of words: some words

originally wide in their application are narrowed to denote shades of

meaning; others originally specific are widened to express

relationships. The term _vernacular_, now meaning mother speech, has

been generalized from the word _verna_, meaning a slave born in the

master's household. _Publication_ has evolved its meaning of

communication by means of print, through restricting an earlier meaning

of any kind of communication--although the wider meaning is retained in

legal procedure, as publishing a libel. The sense of the word _average_

has been generalized from a use connected with dividing loss by

shipwreck proportionately among various sharers in an enterprise.[29]

[29] A large amount of material illustrating the twofold change in

the sense of words will be found in Jevons, _Lessons in Logic_.

[Sidenote: Similar changes occur in the vocabulary of every student]

These historical changes assist the educator to appreciate the changes

that occur with individuals together with advance in intellectual

resources. In studying geometry, a pupil must learn both to narrow and

to extend the meanings of such familiar words as _line_, _surface_,

_angle_, _square_, _circle_; to narrow them to the precise meanings

involved in demonstrations; to extend them to cover generic relations

not expressed in ordinary usage. Qualities of color and size must be

excluded; relations of direction, of variation in direction, of limit,

must be definitely seized. A like transformation occurs, of course, in

every subject of study. Just at this point lies the danger, alluded to

above, of simply overlaying common meanings with new and isolated

meanings instead of effecting a genuine working-over of popular and

practical meanings into adequate logical tools.

[Sidenote: The value of technical terms]

Terms used with intentional exactness so as to express a meaning, the

whole meaning, and only the meaning, are called _technical_. For

educational purposes, a technical term indicates something relative, not

absolute; for a term is technical not because of its verbal form or its

unusualness, but because it is employed to fix a meaning precisely.

Ordinary words get a technical quality when used intentionally for this

end. Whenever thought becomes more accurate, a (relatively) technical

vocabulary grows up. Teachers are apt to oscillate between extremes in

regard to technical terms. On the one hand, these are multiplied in

every direction, seemingly on the assumption that learning a new piece

of terminology, accompanied by verbal description or definition, is

equivalent to grasping a new idea. When it is seen how largely the net

outcome is the accumulation of an isolated set of words, a jargon or

scholastic cant, and to what extent the natural power of judgment is

clogged by this accumulation, there is a reaction to the opposite

extreme. Technical terms are banished: "name words" exist but not

nouns; "action words" but not verbs; pupils may "take away," but not

subtract; they may tell what four fives are, but not what four times

five are, and so on. A sound instinct underlies this reaction--aversion

to words that give the pretense, but not the reality, of meaning. Yet

the fundamental difficulty is not with the word, but with the idea. If

the idea is not grasped, nothing is gained by using a more familiar

word; if the idea is perceived, the use of the term that exactly names

it may assist in fixing the idea. Terms denoting highly exact meanings

should be introduced only sparingly, that is, a few at a time; they

should be led up to gradually, and great pains should be taken to secure

the circumstances that render precision of meaning significant.

[Sidenote: Importance of consecutive discourse]

(_iii_) Consecutive discourse. As we saw, language connects and

organizes meanings as well as selects and fixes them. As every meaning

is set in the context of some situation, so every word in concrete use

belongs to some sentence (it may itself represent a condensed sentence),

and the sentence, in turn, belongs to some larger story, description, or

reasoning process. It is unnecessary to repeat what has been said about

the importance of continuity and ordering of meanings. We may, however,

note some ways in which school practices tend to interrupt

consecutiveness of language and thereby interfere harmfully with

systematic reflection. (_a_) Teachers have a habit of monopolizing

continued discourse. Many, if not most, instructors would be surprised

if informed at the end of the day of the amount of time they have talked

as compared with any pupil. Children's conversation is often confined to

answering questions in brief phrases, or in single disconnected

sentences. Expatiation and explanation are reserved for the teacher,

who often admits any hint at an answer on the part of the pupil, and

then amplifies what he supposes the child must have meant. The habits of

sporadic and fragmentary discourse thus promoted have inevitably a

disintegrating intellectual influence.

[Sidenote: Too minute questioning]

(_b_) Assignment of too short lessons when accompanied (as it usually is

in order to pass the time of the recitation period) by minute "analytic"

questioning has the same effect. This evil is usually at its height in

such subjects as history and literature, where not infrequently the

material is so minutely subdivided as to break up the unity of meaning

belonging to a given portion of the matter, to destroy perspective, and

in effect to reduce the whole topic to an accumulation of disconnected

details all upon the same level. More often than the teacher is aware,

_his_ mind carries and supplies the background of unity of meaning

against which pupils project isolated scraps.

[Sidenote: Making avoidance of error the aim]

(_c_) Insistence upon avoiding error instead of attaining power tends

also to interruption of continuous discourse and thought. Children who

begin with something to say and with intellectual eagerness to say it

are sometimes made so conscious of minor errors in substance and form

that the energy that should go into constructive thinking is diverted

into anxiety not to make mistakes, and even, in extreme cases, into

passive quiescence as the best method of minimizing error. This tendency

is especially marked in connection with the writing of compositions,

essays, and themes. It has even been gravely recommended that little

children should always write on trivial subjects and in short sentences

because in that way they are less likely to make mistakes, while the

teaching of writing to high school and college students occasionally

reduces itself to a technique for detecting and designating mistakes.

The resulting self-consciousness and constraint are only part of the

evil that comes from a negative ideal.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

OBSERVATION AND INFORMATION IN THE TRAINING OF MIND

[Sidenote: No thinking without acquaintance with facts]

Thinking is an ordering of subject-matter with reference to discovering

what it signifies or indicates. Thinking no more exists apart from this

arranging of subject-matter than digestion occurs apart from the

assimilating of food. The way in which the subject-matter is furnished

marks, therefore, a fundamental point. If the subject-matter is provided

in too scanty or too profuse fashion, if it comes in disordered array or

in isolated scraps, the effect upon habits of thought is detrimental. If

personal observation and communication of information by others (whether

in books or speech) are rightly conducted, half the logical battle is

won, for they are the channels of obtaining subject-matter.

Sec. 1. _The Nature and Value of Observation_

[Sidenote: Fallacy of making "facts" an end in themselves]

The protest, mentioned in the last chapter, of educational reformers

against the exaggerated and false use of language, insisted upon

personal and direct observation as the proper alternative course. The

reformers felt that the current emphasis upon the linguistic factor

eliminated all opportunity for first-hand acquaintance with real things;

hence they appealed to sense-perception to fill the gap. It is not

surprising that this enthusiastic zeal failed frequently to ask how and

why observation is educative, and hence fell into the error of making

observation an end in itself and was satisfied with any kind of material

under any kind of conditions. Such isolation of observation is still

manifested in the statement that this faculty develops first, then that

of memory and imagination, and finally the faculty of thought. From this

point of view, observation is regarded as furnishing crude masses of raw

material, to which, later on, reflective processes may be applied. Our

previous pages should have made obvious the fallacy of this point of

view by bringing out the fact that simple concrete thinking attends all

our intercourse with things which is not on a purely physical level.

[Sidenote: The sympathetic motive in extending acquaintance]

I. All persons have a natural desire--akin to curiosity--for a widening

of their range of acquaintance with persons and things. The sign in art

galleries that forbids the carrying of canes and umbrellas is obvious

testimony to the fact that simply to see is not enough for many people;

there is a feeling of lack of acquaintance until some direct contact is

made. This demand for fuller and closer knowledge is quite different

from any conscious interest in observation for its own sake. Desire for

expansion, for "self-realization," is its motive. The interest is

sympathetic, socially and aesthetically sympathetic, rather than

cognitive. While the interest is especially keen in children (because

their actual experience is so small and their possible experience so

large), it still characterizes adults when routine has not blunted its

edge. This sympathetic interest provides the medium for carrying and

binding together what would otherwise be a multitude of items, diverse,

disconnected, and of no intellectual use. These systems are indeed

social and aesthetic rather than consciously intellectual; but they

provide the natural medium for more conscious intellectual explorations.

Some educators have recommended that nature study in the elementary

schools be conducted with a love of nature and a cultivation of aesthetic

appreciation in view rather than in a purely analytic spirit. Others

have urged making much of the care of animals and plants. Both of these

important recommendations have grown out of experience, not out of

theory, but they afford excellent exemplifications of the theoretic

point just made.

[Sidenote: Analytic inspection for the sake of doing]

[Sidenote: Direct and indirect sense training]

II. In normal development, specific analytic observations are originally

connected almost exclusively with the imperative need for noting means

and ends in carrying on activities. When one is _doing_ something, one

is compelled, if the work is to succeed (unless it is purely routine),

to use eyes, ears, and sense of touch as guides to action. Without a

constant and alert exercise of the senses, not even plays and games can

go on; in any form of work, materials, obstacles, appliances, failures,

and successes, must be intently watched. Sense-perception does not occur

for its own sake or for purposes of training, but because it is an

indispensable factor of success in doing what one is interested in

doing. Although not designed for sense-training, this method effects

sense-training in the most economical and thoroughgoing way. Various

schemes have been designed by teachers for cultivating sharp and prompt

observation of forms, as by writing words,--even in an unknown

language,--making arrangements of figures and geometrical forms, and

having pupils reproduce them after a momentary glance. Children often

attain great skill in quick seeing and full reproducing of even

complicated meaningless combinations. But such methods of

training--however valuable as occasional games and diversions--compare

very unfavorably with the training of eye and hand that comes as an

incident of work with tools in wood or metals, or of gardening, cooking,

or the care of animals. Training by isolated exercises leaves no

deposit, leads nowhere; and even the technical skill acquired has little

radiating power, or transferable value. Criticisms made upon the

training of observation on the ground that many persons cannot correctly

reproduce the forms and arrangement of the figures on the face of their

watches misses the point because persons do not look at a watch to find

out whether four o'clock is indicated by IIII or by IV, but to find out

what time it is, and, if observation decides this matter, noting other

details is irrelevant and a waste of time. In the training of

observation the question of end and motive is all-important.

[Sidenote: Scientific observations are linked to problems]

[Sidenote: "Object-lessons" rarely supply problems]

III. The further, more intellectual or scientific, development of

observation follows the line of the growth of practical into theoretical

reflection already traced (_ante_, Chapter Ten). As problems emerge and

are dwelt upon, observation is directed less to the facts that bear upon

a practical aim and more upon what bears upon a problem as such. What

makes observations in schools often intellectually ineffective is (more

than anything else) that they are carried on independently of a sense of

a problem that they serve to define or help to solve. The evil of this

isolation is seen through the entire educational system, from the

kindergarten, through the elementary and high schools, to the college.

Almost everywhere may be found, at some time, recourse to observations

as if they were of complete and final value in themselves, instead of

the means of getting material that bears upon some difficulty and its

solution. In the kindergarten are heaped up observations regarding

geometrical forms, lines, surfaces, cubes, colors, and so on. In the

elementary school, under the name of "object-lessons," the form and

properties of objects,--apple, orange, chalk,--selected almost at

random, are minutely noted, while under the name of "nature study"

similar observations are directed upon leaves, stones, insects, selected

in almost equally arbitrary fashion. In high school and college,

laboratory and microscopic observations are carried on as if the

accumulation of observed facts and the acquisition of skill in

manipulation were educational ends in themselves.

Compare with these methods of isolated observations the statement of

Jevons that observation as conducted by scientific men is effective

"only when excited and guided by hope of verifying a theory"; and again,

"the number of things which can be observed and experimented upon are

infinite, and if we merely set to work to record facts without any

distinct purpose, our records will have no value." Strictly speaking,

the first statement of Jevons is too narrow. Scientific men institute

observations not merely to test an idea (or suggested explanatory

meaning), but also to locate the nature of a problem and thereby guide

the formation of a hypothesis. But the principle of his remark, namely,

that scientific men never make the accumulation of observations an end

in itself, but always a means to a general intellectual conclusion, is

absolutely sound. Until the force of this principle is adequately

recognized in education, observation will be largely a matter of

uninteresting dead work or of acquiring forms of technical skill that

are not available as intellectual resources.

Sec. 2. _Methods and Materials of Observation in the Schools_ The best

methods in use in our schools furnish many suggestions for giving

observation its right place in mental training.

[Sidenote: Observation should involve discovery]

I. They rest upon the sound assumption that observation is an _active_

process. Observation is exploration, inquiry for the sake of discovering

something previously hidden and unknown, this something being needed in

order to reach some end, practical or theoretical. Observation is to be

discriminated from recognition, or perception of what is familiar. The

identification of something already understood is, indeed, an

indispensable function of further investigation (_ante_, p. 119); but it

is relatively automatic and passive, while observation proper is

searching and deliberate. Recognition refers to the already mastered;

observation is concerned with mastering the unknown. The common notions

that perception is like writing on a blank piece of paper, or like

impressing an image on the mind as a seal is imprinted on wax or as a

picture is formed on a photographic plate (notions that have played a

disastrous role in educational methods), arise from a failure to

distinguish between automatic recognition and the searching attitude of

genuine observation.

[Sidenote: and suspense during an unfolding change]

II. Much assistance in the selection of appropriate material for

observation may be derived from considering the eagerness and closeness

of observation that attend the following of a story or drama. Alertness

of observation is at its height wherever there is "plot interest." Why?

Because of the balanced combination of the old and the new, of the

familiar and the unexpected. We hang on the lips of the story-teller

because of the element of mental suspense. Alternatives are suggested,

but are left ambiguous, so that our whole being questions: What befell

next? Which way did things turn out? Contrast the ease and fullness with

which a child notes all the salient traits of a story, with the labor

and inadequacy of his observation of some dead and static thing where

nothing raises a question or suggests alternative outcomes.

[Sidenote: This "plot interest" manifested in activity,]

When an individual is engaged in doing or making something (the activity

not being of such a mechanical and habitual character that its outcome

is assured), there is an analogous situation. Something is going to come

of what is present to the sense, but just what is doubtful. The plot is

unfolding toward success or failure, but just when or how is uncertain.

Hence the keen and tense observation of conditions and results that

attends constructive manual operations. Where the subject-matter is of a

more impersonal sort, the same principle of movement toward a denouement

may apply. It is a commonplace that what is moving attracts notice when

that which is at rest escapes it. Yet too often it would almost seem as

if pains had been taken to deprive the material of school observations

of all life and dramatic quality, to reduce it to a dead and inert form.

Mere change is not enough, however. Vicissitude, alteration, motion,

excite observation; but if they merely excite it, there is no thought.

The changes must (like the incidents of a well-arranged story or plot)

take place in a certain cumulative order; each successive change must at

once remind us of its predecessor and arouse interest in its successor

if observations of change are to be logically fruitful.

[Sidenote: and in cycles of growth]

Living beings, plants, and animals, fulfill the twofold requirement to

an extraordinary degree. Where there is growth, there is motion,

change, process; and there is also arrangement of the changes in a

cycle. The first arouses, the second organizes, observation. Much of the

extraordinary interest that children take in planting seeds and watching

the stages of their growth is due to the fact that a drama is enacting

before their eyes; there is something doing, each step of which is

important in the destiny of the plant. The great practical improvements

that have occurred of late years in the teaching of botany and zooelogy

will be found, upon inspection, to involve treating plants and animals

as beings that act, that do something, instead of as mere inert

specimens having static properties to be inventoried, named, and

registered. Treated in the latter fashion, observation is inevitably

reduced to the falsely "analytic" (_ante_, p. 112),--to mere dissection

and enumeration.

[Sidenote: Observation of structure grows out of noting function]

There is, of course, a place, and an important place, for observation of

the mere static qualities of objects. When, however, the primary

interest is in _function_, in what the object does, there is a motive

for more minute analytic study, for the observation of _structure_.

Interest in noting an activity passes insensibly into noting how the

activity is carried on; the interest in what is accomplished passes over

into an interest in the organs of its accomplishing. But when the

beginning is made with the morphological, the anatomical, the noting of

peculiarities of form, size, color, and distribution of parts, the

material is so cut off from significance as to be dead and dull. It is

as natural for children to look intently for the _stomata_ of a plant

after they have become interested in its function of breathing, as it is

repulsive to attend minutely to them when they are considered as

isolated peculiarities of structure.

[Sidenote: Scientific observation]

III. As the center of interest of observations becomes less personal,

less a matter of means for effecting one's own ends, and less aesthetic,

less a matter of contribution of parts to a total emotional effect,

observation becomes more consciously intellectual in quality. Pupils

learn to observe for the sake (_i_) of finding out what sort of

perplexity confronts them; (_ii_) of inferring hypothetical explanations

for the puzzling features that observation reveals; and (_iii_) of

testing the ideas thus suggested.

[Sidenote: should be extensive]

[Sidenote: and intensive]

In short, observation becomes scientific in nature. Of such observations

it may be said that they should follow a rhythm between the extensive

and the intensive. Problems become definite, and suggested explanations

significant by a certain alternation between a wide and somewhat loose

soaking in of relevant facts and a minutely accurate study of a few

selected facts. The wider, less exact observation is necessary to give

the student a feeling for the reality of the field of inquiry, a sense

of its bearings and possibilities, and to store his mind with materials

that imagination may transform into suggestions. The intensive study is

necessary for limiting the problem, and for securing the conditions of

experimental testing. As the latter by itself is too specialized and

technical to arouse intellectual growth, the former by itself is too

superficial and scattering for control of intellectual development. In

the sciences of life, field study, excursions, acquaintance with living

things in their natural habitats, may alternate with microscopic and

laboratory observation. In the physical sciences, phenomena of light, of

heat, of electricity, of moisture, of gravity, in their broad setting in

nature--their physiographic setting--should prepare for an exact study

of selected facts under conditions of laboratory control. In this way,

the student gets the benefit of technical scientific methods of

discovery and testing, while he retains his sense of the identity of the

laboratory modes of energy with large out-of-door realities, thereby

avoiding the impression (that so often accrues) that the facts studied

are peculiar to the laboratory.

Sec. 3. _Communication of Information_

[Sidenote: Importance of hearsay acquaintance]

When all is said and done the field of fact open to any one observer by

himself is narrow. Into every one of our beliefs, even those that we

have worked out under the conditions of utmost personal, first-hand

acquaintance, much has insensibly entered from what we have heard or

read of the observations and conclusions of others. In spite of the

great extension of direct observation in our schools, the vast bulk of

educational subject-matter is derived from other sources--from

text-book, lecture, and viva-voce interchange. No educational question

is of greater import than how to get the most logical good out of

learning through transmission from others.

[Sidenote: Logically, this ranks only as evidence or testimony]

Doubtless the chief meaning associated with the word _instruction_ is

this conveying and instilling of the results of the observations and

inferences of others. Doubtless the undue prominence in education of the

ideal of amassing information (_ante_, p. 52) has its source in the

prominence of the learning of other persons. The problem then is how to

convert it into an intellectual asset. In logical terms, the material

supplied from the experience of others is _testimony_: that is to say,

_evidence_ submitted by others to be employed by one's own judgment in

reaching a conclusion. How shall we treat the subject-matter supplied by

text-book and teacher so that it shall rank as material for reflective

inquiry, not as ready-made intellectual pabulum to be accepted and

swallowed just as supplied by the store?

[Sidenote: Communication by others should not encroach on observation,]

In reply to this question, we may say (_i_) that the communication of

material should be _needed_. That is to say, it should be such as cannot

readily be attained by personal observation. For teacher or book to cram

pupils with facts which, with little more trouble, they could discover

by direct inquiry is to violate their intellectual integrity by

cultivating mental servility. This does not mean that the material

supplied through communication of others should be meager or scanty.

With the utmost range of the senses, the world of nature and history

stretches out almost infinitely beyond. But the fields within which

direct observation is feasible should be carefully chosen and sacredly

protected.

[Sidenote: should not be dogmatic in tone,]

(_ii_) Material should be supplied by way of stimulus, not with dogmatic

finality and rigidity. When pupils get the notion that any field of

study has been definitely surveyed, that knowledge about it is

exhaustive and final, they may continue docile pupils, but they cease to

be students. All thinking whatsoever--so be it _is_ thinking--contains a

phase of originality. This originality does not imply that the student's

conclusion varies from the conclusions of others, much less that it is a

radically novel conclusion. His originality is not incompatible with

large use of materials and suggestions contributed by others.

Originality means personal interest in the question, personal initiative

in turning over the suggestions furnished by others, and sincerity in

following them out to a tested conclusion. Literally, the phrase "Think

for yourself" is tautological; any thinking is thinking for one's self.

[Sidenote: should have relation to a personal problem,]

(_iii_) The material furnished by way of information should be relevant

to a question that is vital in the student's own experience. What has

been said about the evil of observations that begin and end in

themselves may be transferred without change to communicated learning.

Instruction in subject-matter that does not fit into any problem already

stirring in the student's own experience, or that is not presented in

such a way as to arouse a problem, is worse than useless for

intellectual purposes. In that it fails to enter into any process of

reflection, it is useless; in that it remains in the mind as so much

lumber and debris, it is a barrier, an obstruction in the way of

effective thinking when a problem arises.

[Sidenote: and to prior systems of experience]

Another way of stating the same principle is that material furnished by

communication must be such as to enter into some existing system or

organization of experience. All students of psychology are familiar with

the principle of apperception--that we assimilate new material with what

we have digested and retained from prior experiences. Now the

"apperceptive basis" of material furnished by teacher and text-book

should be found, as far as possible, in what the learner has derived

from more direct forms of his own experience. There is a tendency to

connect material of the schoolroom simply with the material of prior

school lessons, instead of linking it to what the pupil has acquired in

his out-of-school experience. The teacher says, "Do you not remember

what we learned from the book last week?"--instead of saying, "Do you

not recall such and such a thing that you have seen or heard?" As a

result, there are built up detached and independent systems of school

knowledge that inertly overlay the ordinary systems of experience

instead of reacting to enlarge and refine them. Pupils are taught to

live in two separate worlds, one the world of out-of-school experience,

the other the world of books and lessons.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE RECITATION AND THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT

[Sidenote: Importance of the recitation]

In the recitation the teacher comes into his closest contact with the

pupil. In the recitation focus the possibilities of guiding children's

activities, influencing their language habits, and directing their

observations. In discussing the significance of the recitation as an

instrumentality of education, we are accordingly bringing to a head the

points considered in the last three chapters, rather than introducing a

new topic. The method in which the recitation is carried on is a crucial

test of a teacher's skill in diagnosing the intellectual state of his

pupils and in supplying the conditions that will arouse serviceable

mental responses: in short, of his art as a teacher.

[Sidenote: Re-citing _versus_ reflecting]

The use of the word _recitation_ to designate the period of most

intimate intellectual contact of teacher with pupil and pupil with pupil

is a fateful fact. To re-cite is to cite again, to repeat, to tell over

and over. If we were to call this period _reiteration_, the designation

would hardly bring out more clearly than does the word _recitation_, the

complete domination of instruction by rehearsing of secondhand

information, by memorizing for the sake of producing correct replies at

the proper time. Everything that is said in this chapter is

insignificant in comparison with the primary truth that the recitation

is a place and time for stimulating and directing reflection, and that

reproducing memorized matter is only an incident--even though an

indispensable incident--in the process of cultivating a thoughtful

attitude.

Sec. 1. _The Formal Steps of Instruction_

[Sidenote: Herbart's analysis of method of teaching]

But few attempts have been made to formulate a method, resting on

general principles, of conducting a recitation. One of these is of great

importance and has probably had more and better influence upon the

"hearing of lessons" than all others put together; namely, the analysis

by Herbart of a recitation into five successive steps. The steps are

commonly known as "the formal steps of instruction." The underlying

notion is that no matter how subjects vary in scope and detail there is

one and only one best way of mastering them, since there is a single

"general method" uniformly followed by the mind in effective attack upon

any subject. Whether it be a first-grade child mastering the rudiments

of number, a grammar-school pupil studying history, or a college student

dealing with philology, in each case the first step is preparation, the

second presentation, followed in turn by comparison and generalization,

ending in the application of the generalizations to specific and new

instances.

[Sidenote: Illustration of method]

By preparation is meant asking questions to remind pupils of familiar

experiences of their own that will be useful in acquiring the new topic.

What one already knows supplies the means with which one apprehends the

unknown. Hence the process of learning the new will be made easier if

related ideas in the pupil's mind are aroused to activity--are brought

to the foreground of consciousness. When pupils take up the study of

rivers, they are first questioned about streams or brooks with which

they are already acquainted; if they have never seen any, they may be

asked about water running in gutters. Somehow "apperceptive masses" are

stirred that will assist in getting hold of the new subject. The step of

preparation ends with statement of the aim of the lesson. Old knowledge

having been made active, new material is then "presented" to the pupils.

Pictures and relief models of rivers are shown; vivid oral descriptions

are given; if possible, the children are taken to see an actual river.

These two steps terminate the acquisition of particular facts.

The next two steps are directed toward getting a general principle or

conception. The local river is compared with, perhaps, the Amazon, the

St. Lawrence, the Rhine; by this comparison accidental and unessential

features are eliminated and the river _concept_ is formed: the elements

involved in the river-meaning are gathered together and formulated. This

done, the resulting principle is fixed in mind and is clarified by being

applied to other streams, say to the Thames, the Po, the Connecticut.

[Sidenote: Comparison with our prior analysis of reflection]

If we compare this account of the methods of instruction with our own

analysis of a complete operation of thinking, we are struck by obvious

resemblances. In our statement (compare Chapter Six) the "steps" are the

occurrence of a problem or a puzzling phenomenon; then observation,

inspection of facts, to locate and clear up the problem; then the

formation of a hypothesis or the suggestion of a possible solution

together with its elaboration by reasoning; then the testing of the

elaborated idea by using it as a guide to new observations and

experimentations. In each account, there is the sequence of (_i_)

specific facts and events, (_ii_) ideas and reasonings, and (_iii_)

application of their result to specific facts. In each case, the

movement is inductive-deductive. We are struck also by one difference:

the Herbartian method makes no reference to a difficulty, a discrepancy

requiring explanation, as the origin and stimulus of the whole process.

As a consequence, it often seems as if the Herbartian method deals with

thought simply as an incident in the process of acquiring information,

instead of treating the latter as an incident in the process of

developing thought.

[Sidenote: The formal steps concern the teacher's preparation rather

than the recitation itself]

Before following up this comparison in more detail, we may raise the

question whether the recitation should, in any case, follow a uniform

prescribed series of steps--even if it be admitted that this series

expresses the normal logical order. In reply, it may be said that just

because the order is logical, it represents the survey of subject-matter

made by one who already understands it, not the path of progress

followed by a mind that is learning. The former may describe a uniform

straight-way course, the latter must be a series of tacks, of zigzag

movements back and forth. In short, the formal steps indicate the points

that should be covered by the teacher in preparing to conduct a

recitation, but should not prescribe the actual course of teaching.

[Sidenote: The teacher's problem]

Lack of any preparation on the part of a teacher leads, of course, to a

random, haphazard recitation, its success depending on the inspiration

of the moment, which may or may not come. Preparation in simply the

subject-matter conduces to a rigid order, the teacher examining pupils

on their exact knowledge of their text. But the teacher's problem--as a

teacher--does not reside in mastering a subject-matter, but in adjusting

a subject-matter to the nurture of thought. Now the formal steps

indicate excellently well the questions a teacher should ask in working

out the problem of teaching a topic. What preparation have my pupils for

attacking this subject? What familiar experiences of theirs are

available? What have they already learned that will come to their

assistance? How shall I present the matter so as to fit economically and

effectively into their present equipment? What pictures shall I show? To

what objects shall I call their attention? What incidents shall I

relate? What comparisons shall I lead them to draw, what similarities to

recognize? What is the general principle toward which the whole

discussion should point as its conclusion? By what applications shall I

try to fix, to clear up, and to make real their grasp of this general

principle? What activities of their own may bring it home to them as a

genuinely significant principle?

[Sidenote: Only flexibility of procedure gives a recitation vitality]

[Sidenote: Any step may come first]

No teacher can fail to teach better if he has considered such questions

somewhat systematically. But the more the teacher has reflected upon

pupils' probable intellectual response to a topic from the various

stand-points indicated by the five formal steps, the more he will be

prepared to conduct the recitation in a flexible and free way, and yet

not let the subject go to pieces and the pupils' attention drift in all

directions; the less necessary will he find it, in order to preserve a

semblance of intellectual order, to follow some one uniform scheme. He

will be ready to take advantage of any sign of vital response that shows

itself from any direction. One pupil may already have some

inkling--probably erroneous--of a general principle. Application may

then come at the very beginning in order to show that the principle will

not work, and thereby induce search for new facts and a new

generalization. Or the abrupt presentation of some fact or object may so

stimulate the minds of pupils as to render quite superfluous any

preliminary preparation. If pupils' minds are at work at all, it is

quite impossible that they should wait until the teacher has

conscientiously taken them through the steps of preparation,

presentation, and comparison before they form at least a working

hypothesis or generalization. Moreover, unless comparison of the

familiar and the unfamiliar is introduced at the beginning, both

preparation and presentation will be aimless and without logical motive,

isolated, and in so far meaningless. The student's mind cannot be

prepared at large, but only for something in particular, and

presentation is usually the best way of evoking associations. The

emphasis may fall now on the familiar concept that will help grasp the

new, now on the new facts that frame the problem; but in either case it

is comparison and contrast with the other term of the pair which gives

either its force. In short, to transfer the logical steps from the

points that the teacher needs to consider to uniform successive steps in

the conduct of a recitation, is to impose the logical review of a mind

that already understands the subject, upon the mind that is struggling

to comprehend it, and thereby to obstruct the logic of the student's own

mind.

Sec. 2. _The Factors in the Recitation_

Bearing in mind that the formal steps represent intertwined factors of a

student's progress and not mileposts on a beaten highway, we may

consider each by itself. In so doing, it will be convenient to follow

the example of many of the Herbartians and reduce the steps to three:

first, the apprehension of specific or particular facts; second,

rational generalization; third, application and verification.

[Sidenote: Preparation is getting the sense of a problem]

I. The processes having to do with particular facts are preparation and

presentation. The best, indeed the only preparation is arousal to a

perception of something that needs explanation, something unexpected,

puzzling, peculiar. When the feeling of a genuine perplexity lays hold

of any mind (no matter how the feeling arises), that mind is alert and

inquiring, because stimulated from within. The shock, the bite, of a

question will force the mind to go wherever it is capable of going,

better than will the most ingenious pedagogical devices unaccompanied by

this mental ardor. It is the sense of a problem that forces the mind to

a survey and recall of the past to discover what the question means and

how it may be dealt with.

[Sidenote: Pitfalls in preparation]

The teacher in his more deliberate attempts to call into play the

familiar elements in a student's experience, must guard against certain

dangers. (_i_) The step of preparation must not be too long continued or

too exhaustive, or it defeats its own end. The pupil loses interest and

is bored, when a plunge _in medias res_ might have braced him to his

work. The preparation part of the recitation period of some

conscientious teachers reminds one of the boy who takes so long a run in

order to gain headway for a jump that when he reaches the line, he is

too tired to jump far. (_ii_) The organs by which we apprehend new

material are our habits. To insist too minutely upon turning over

habitual dispositions into conscious ideas is to interfere with their

best workings. Some factors of familiar experience must indeed be

brought to conscious recognition, just as transplanting is necessary

for the best growth of some plants. But it is fatal to be forever

digging up either experiences or plants to see how they are getting

along. Constraint, self-consciousness, embarrassment, are the

consequence of too much conscious refurbishing of familiar experiences.

[Sidenote: Statement of aim of lesson]

Strict Herbartians generally lay it down that statement--by the

teacher--of the aim of a lesson is an indispensable part of preparation.

This preliminary statement of the aim of the lesson hardly seems more

intellectual in character, however, than tapping a bell or giving any

other signal for attention and transfer of thoughts from diverting

subjects. To the teacher the statement of an end is significant, because

he has already been at the end; from a pupil's standpoint the statement

of what he is _going_ to learn is something of an Irish bull. If the

statement of the aim is taken too seriously by the instructor, as

meaning more than a signal to attention, its probable result is

forestalling the pupil's own reaction, relieving him of the

responsibility of developing a problem and thus arresting his mental

initiative.

[Sidenote: How much the teacher should tell or show]

It is unnecessary to discuss at length presentation as a factor in the

recitation, because our last chapter covered the topic under the

captions of observation and communication. The function of presentation

is to supply materials that force home the nature of a problem and

furnish suggestions for dealing with it. The practical problem of the

teacher is to preserve a balance between so little showing and telling

as to fail to stimulate reflection and so much as to choke thought.

Provided the student is genuinely engaged upon a topic, and provided the

teacher is willing to give the student a good deal of leeway as to what

he assimilates and retains (not requiring rigidly that everything be

grasped or reproduced), there is comparatively little danger that one

who is himself enthusiastic will communicate too much concerning a

topic.

[Sidenote: The pupil's responsibility for making out a reasonable case]

II. The distinctively rational phase of reflective inquiry consists, as

we have already seen, in the elaboration of an idea, or working

hypothesis, through conjoint comparison and contrast, terminating in

definition or formulation. (_i_) So far as the recitation is concerned,

the primary requirement is that the student be held responsible for

working out mentally every suggested principle so as to show what he

means by it, how it bears upon the facts at hand, and how the facts bear

upon it. Unless the pupil is made responsible for developing on his own

account the _reasonableness_ of the guess he puts forth, the recitation

counts for practically nothing in the training of reasoning power. A

clever teacher easily acquires great skill in dropping out the inept and

senseless contributions of pupils, and in selecting and emphasizing

those in line with the result he wishes to reach. But this method

(sometimes called "suggestive questioning") relieves the pupils of

intellectual responsibility, save for acrobatic agility in following the

teacher's lead.

[Sidenote: The necessity for mental leisure]

(_ii_) The working over of a vague and more or less casual idea into

coherent and definite form is impossible without a pause, without

freedom from distraction. We say "Stop and think"; well, all reflection

involves, at some point, stopping external observations and reactions so

that an idea may mature. Meditation, withdrawal or abstraction from

clamorous assailants of the senses and from demands for overt action, is

as necessary at the reasoning stage, as are observation and experiment

at other periods. The metaphors of digestion and assimilation, that so

readily occur to mind in connection with rational elaboration, are

highly instructive. A silent, uninterrupted working-over of

considerations by comparing and weighing alternative suggestions, is

indispensable for the development of coherent and compact conclusions.

Reasoning is no more akin to disputing or arguing, or to the abrupt

seizing and dropping of suggestions, than digestion is to a noisy

champing of the jaws. The teacher must secure opportunity for leisurely

mental digestion.

[Sidenote: A typical central object necessary]

(_iii_) In the process of comparison, the teacher must avert the

distraction that ensues from putting before the mind a number of facts

on the same level of importance. Since attention is selective, some one

object normally claims thought and furnishes the center of departure and

reference. This fact is fatal to the success of the pedagogical methods

that endeavor to conduct comparison on the basis of putting before the

mind a row of objects of equal importance. In comparing, the mind does

not naturally begin with objects _a_, _b_, _c_, _d_, and try to find the

respect in which they agree. It begins with a single object or situation

more or less vague and inchoate in meaning, and makes excursions to

other objects in order to render understanding of the central object

consistent and clear. The mere multiplication of objects of comparison

is adverse to successful reasoning. Each fact brought within the field

of comparison should clear up some obscure feature or extend some

fragmentary trait of the primary object.

[Sidenote: Importance of types]

In short, pains should be taken to see that the object on which thought

centers is _typical_: material being typical when, although individual

or specific, it is such as readily and fruitfully suggests the

principles of an entire class of facts. No sane person begins to think

about rivers wholesale or at large. He begins with the one river that

has presented some puzzling trait. Then he studies other rivers to get

light upon the baffling features of this one, and at the same time he

employs the characteristic traits of his original object to reduce to

order the multifarious details that appear in connection with other

rivers. This working back and forth preserves unity of meaning, while

protecting it from monotony and narrowness. Contrast, unlikeness, throws

significant features into relief, and these become instruments for

binding together into an organized or coherent meaning dissimilar

characters. The mind is defended against the deadening influence of many

isolated particulars and also against the barrenness of a merely formal

principle. Particular cases and properties supply emphasis and

concreteness; general principles convert the particulars into a single

system.

[Sidenote: All insight into meaning effects generalization]

(_iv_) Hence generalization is not a separate and single act; it is

rather a constant tendency and function of the entire discussion or

recitation. Every step forward toward an idea that comprehends, that

explains, that unites what was isolated and therefore puzzling,

generalizes. The little child generalizes as truly as the adolescent or

adult, even though he does not arrive at the same generalities. If he is

studying a river basin, his knowledge is generalized in so far as the

various details that he apprehends are found to be the effects of a

single force, as that of water pushing downward from gravity, or are

seen to be successive stages of a single history of formation. Even if

there were acquaintance with only one river, knowledge of it under such

conditions would be generalized knowledge.

[Sidenote: Insight into meaning requires formulation]

The factor of formulation, of conscious stating, involved in

generalization, should also be a constant function, not a single formal

act. Definition means essentially the growth of a meaning out of

vagueness into _definiteness_. Such final verbal definition as takes

place should be only the culmination of a steady growth in distinctness.

In the reaction against ready-made verbal definitions and rules, the

pendulum should never swing to the opposite extreme, that of neglecting

to summarize the net meaning that emerges from dealing with particular

facts. Only as general summaries are made from time to time does the

mind reach a conclusion or a resting place; and only as conclusions are

reached is there an intellectual deposit available in future

understanding.

[Sidenote: Generalization means capacity for application to the new]

III. As the last words indicate, application and generalization lie

close together. Mechanical skill for further use may be achieved without

any explicit recognition of a principle; nay, in routine and narrow

technical matters, conscious formulation may be a hindrance. But without

recognition of a principle, without generalization, the power gained

cannot be transferred to new and dissimilar matters. The inherent

significance of generalization is that it frees a meaning from local

restrictions; rather, generalization _is_ meaning so freed; it is

meaning emancipated from accidental features so as to be available in

new cases. The surest test for detecting a spurious generalization (a

statement general in verbal form but not accompanied by discernment of

meaning), is the failure of the so-called principle spontaneously to

extend itself. The essence of the general is application. (_Ante_, p.

29.)

[Sidenote: Fossilized _versus_ flexible principles]

The true purpose of exercises that apply rules and principles is, then,

not so much to drive or drill them in as to give adequate insight into

an idea or principle. To treat application as a separate final step is

disastrous. In every judgment some meaning is employed as a basis for

estimating and interpreting some fact; by this application the meaning

is itself enlarged and tested. When the general meaning is regarded as

complete in itself, application is treated as an external,

non-intellectual use to which, for practical purposes alone, it is

advisable to put the meaning. The principle is one self-contained thing;

its use is another and independent thing. When this divorce occurs,

principles become fossilized and rigid; they lose their inherent

vitality, their self-impelling power.

[Sidenote: Self-application a mark of genuine principles]

A true conception is a _moving_ idea, and it seeks outlet, or

application to the interpretation of particulars and the guidance of

action, as naturally as water runs downhill. In fine, just as reflective

thought requires particular facts of observation and events of action

for its origination, so it also requires particular facts and deeds for

its own consummation. "Glittering generalities" are inert because they

are spurious. Application is as much an intrinsic part of genuine

reflective inquiry as is alert observation or reasoning itself. Truly

general principles tend to apply themselves. The teacher needs, indeed,

to supply conditions favorable to use and exercise; but something is

wrong when artificial tasks have arbitrarily to be invented in order to

secure application for principles.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

SOME GENERAL CONCLUSIONS

We shall conclude our survey of how we think and how we should think by

presenting some factors of thinking which should balance each other, but

which constantly tend to become so isolated that they work against each

other instead of cooperating to make reflective inquiry efficient.

Sec. 1. _The Unconscious and the Conscious_

[Sidenote: The _understood_ as the unconsciously assumed]

It is significant that one meaning of the term _understood_ is something

so thoroughly mastered, so completely agreed upon, as to be _assumed_;

that is to say, taken as a matter of course without explicit statement.

The familiar "goes without saying" means "it is understood." If two

persons can converse intelligently with each other, it is because a

common experience supplies a background of mutual understanding upon

which their respective remarks are projected. To dig up and to formulate

this common background would be imbecile; it is "understood"; that is,

it is silently supplied and implied as the taken-for-granted medium of

intelligent exchange of ideas.

[Sidenote: Inquiry as conscious formulation]

If, however, the two persons find themselves at cross-purposes, it is

necessary to dig up and compare the presuppositions, the implied

context, on the basis of which each is speaking. The implicit is made

explicit; what was unconsciously assumed is exposed to the light of

conscious day. In this way, the root of the misunderstanding is

removed. Some such rhythm of the unconscious and the conscious is

involved in all fruitful thinking. A person in pursuing a consecutive

train of thoughts takes some system of ideas for granted (which

accordingly he leaves unexpressed, "unconscious") as surely as he does

in conversing with others. Some context, some situation, some

controlling purpose dominates his explicit ideas so thoroughly that it

does not need to be consciously formulated and expounded. Explicit

thinking goes on within the limits of what is implied or understood. Yet

the fact that reflection originates in a problem makes it necessary _at

some points_ consciously to inspect and examine this familiar

background. We have to turn upon some unconscious assumption and make it

explicit.

[Sidenote: Rules cannot be given for attaining a balance]

No rules can be laid down for attaining the due balance and rhythm of

these two phases of mental life. No ordinance can prescribe at just what

point the spontaneous working of some unconscious attitude and habit is

to be checked till we have made explicit what is implied in it. No one

can tell in detail just how far the analytic inspection and formulation

are to be carried. We can say that they must be carried far enough so

that the individual will know what he is about and be able to guide his

thinking; but in a given case just how far is that? We can say that they

must be carried far enough to detect and guard against the source of

some false perception or reasoning, and to get a leverage on the

investigation; but such statements only restate the original difficulty.

Since our reliance must be upon the disposition and tact of the

individual in the particular case, there is no test of the success of an

education more important than the extent to which it nurtures a type of

mind competent to maintain an economical balance of the unconscious and

the conscious.

[Sidenote: The over-_analytic_ to be avoided]

The ways of teaching criticised in the foregoing pages as false

"analytic" methods of instruction (_ante_, p. 112), all reduce

themselves to the mistake of directing explicit attention and

formulation to what would work better if left an unconscious attitude

and working assumption. To pry into the familiar, the usual, the

automatic, simply for the sake of making it conscious, simply for the

sake of formulating it, is both an impertinent interference, and a

source of boredom. To be forced to dwell consciously upon the accustomed

is the essence of ennui; to pursue methods of instruction that have that

tendency is deliberately to cultivate lack of interest.

[Sidenote: The detection of error, the clinching of truth, demand

conscious statement]

On the other hand, what has been said in criticism of merely routine

forms of skill, what has been said about the importance of having a

genuine problem, of introducing the novel, and of reaching a deposit of

general meaning weighs on the other side of the scales. It is as fatal

to good thinking to fail to make conscious the standing source of some

error or failure as it is to pry needlessly into what works smoothly. To

over-simplify, to exclude the novel for the sake of prompt skill, to

avoid obstacles for the sake of averting errors, is as detrimental as to

try to get pupils to formulate everything they know and to state every

step of the process employed in getting a result. Where the shoe

pinches, analytic examination is indicated. When a topic is to be

clinched so that knowledge of it will carry over into an effective

resource in further topics, conscious condensation and summarizing are

imperative. In the early stage of acquaintance with a subject, a good

deal of unconstrained unconscious mental play about it may be

permitted, even at the risk of some random experimenting; in the later

stages, conscious formulation and review may be encouraged. Projection

and reflection, going directly ahead and turning back in scrutiny,

should alternate. Unconsciousness gives spontaneity and freshness;

consciousness, conviction and control.

Sec. 2. _Process and Product_

[Sidenote: Play and work again]

A like balance in mental life characterizes process and product. We met

one important phase of this adjustment in considering play and work. In

play, interest centers in activity, without much reference to its

outcome. The sequence of deeds, images, emotions, suffices on its own

account. In work, the end holds attention and controls the notice given

to means. Since the difference is one of direction of interest, the

contrast is one of emphasis, not of cleavage. When comparative

prominence in consciousness of activity or outcome is transformed into

isolation of one from the other, play degenerates into fooling, and work

into drudgery.

[Sidenote: Play should not be fooling,]

By "fooling" we understand a series of disconnected temporary overflows

of energy dependent upon whim and accident. When all reference to

outcome is eliminated from the sequence of ideas and acts that make

play, each member of the sequence is cut loose from every other and

becomes fantastic, arbitrary, aimless; mere fooling follows. There is

some inveterate tendency to fool in children as well as in animals; nor

is the tendency wholly evil, for at least it militates against falling

into ruts. But when it is excessive in amount, dissipation and

disintegration follow; and the only way of preventing this consequence

is to make regard for results enter into even the freest play activity.

[Sidenote: nor work, drudgery]

Exclusive interest in the result alters work to drudgery. For by

drudgery is meant those activities in which the interest in the outcome

does not suffuse the means of getting the result. Whenever a piece of

work becomes drudgery, the process of doing loses all value for the

doer; he cares solely for what is to be had at the end of it. The work

itself, the putting forth of energy, is hateful; it is just a necessary

evil, since without it some important end would be missed. Now it is a

commonplace that in the work of the world many things have to be done

the doing of which is not intrinsically very interesting. However, the

argument that children should be kept doing drudgery-tasks because

thereby they acquire power to be faithful to distasteful duties, is

wholly fallacious. Repulsion, shirking, and evasion are the consequences

of having the repulsive imposed--not loyal love of duty. Willingness to

work for ends by means of acts not naturally attractive is best attained

by securing such an appreciation of the value of the end that a sense of

its value is transferred to its means of accomplishment. Not interesting

in themselves, they borrow interest from the result with which they are

associated.

[Sidenote: Balance of playfulness and seriousness the intellectual

ideal]

[Sidenote: Free play of mind]

[Sidenote: is normal in childhood]

The intellectual harm accruing from divorce of work and play, product

and process, is evidenced in the proverb, "All work and no play makes

Jack a dull boy." That the obverse is true is perhaps sufficiently

signalized in the fact that fooling is so near to foolishness. To be

playful and serious at the same time is possible, and it defines the

ideal mental condition. Absence of dogmatism and prejudice, presence of

intellectual curiosity and flexibility, are manifest in the free play of

the mind upon a topic. To give the mind this free play is not to

encourage toying with a subject, but is to be interested in the

unfolding of the subject on its own account, apart from its subservience

to a preconceived belief or habitual aim. Mental play is

open-mindedness, faith in the power of thought to preserve its own

integrity without external supports and arbitrary restrictions. Hence

free mental play involves seriousness, the earnest following of the

development of subject-matter. It is incompatible with carelessness or

flippancy, for it exacts accurate noting of every result reached in

order that every conclusion may be put to further use. What is termed

the interest in truth for its own sake is certainly a serious matter,

yet this pure interest in truth coincides with love of the free play of

thought.

In spite of many appearances to the contrary--usually due to social

conditions of either undue superfluity that induces idle fooling or

undue economic pressure that compels drudgery--childhood normally

realizes the ideal of conjoint free mental play and thoughtfulness.

Successful portrayals of children have always made their wistful

intentness at least as obvious as their lack of worry for the morrow. To

live in the present is compatible with condensation of far-reaching

meanings in the present. Such enrichment of the present for its own sake

is the just heritage of childhood and the best insurer of future growth.

The child forced into premature concern with economic remote results may

develop a surprising sharpening of wits in a particular direction, but

this precocious specialization is always paid for by later apathy and

dullness.

[Sidenote: The attitude of the artist]

That art originated in play is a common saying. Whether or not the

saying is historically correct, it suggests that harmony of mental

playfulness and seriousness describes the artistic ideal. When the

artist is preoccupied overmuch with means and materials, he may achieve

wonderful technique, but not the artistic spirit _par excellence_. When

the animating idea is in excess of the command of method, aesthetic

feeling may be indicated, but the art of presentation is too defective

to express the feeling thoroughly. When the thought of the end becomes

so adequate that it compels translation into the means that embody it,

or when attention to means is inspired by recognition of the end they

serve, we have the attitude typical of the artist, an attitude that may

be displayed in all activities, even though not conventionally

designated arts.

[Sidenote: The art of the teacher culminates in nurturing this attitude]

That teaching is an art and the true teacher an artist is a familiar

saying. Now the teacher's own claim to rank as an artist is measured by

his ability to foster the attitude of the artist in those who study with

him, whether they be youth or little children. Some succeed in arousing

enthusiasm, in communicating large ideas, in evoking energy. So far,

well; but the final test is whether the stimulus thus given to wider

aims succeeds in transforming itself into power, that is to say, into

the attention to detail that ensures mastery over means of execution. If

not, the zeal flags, the interest dies out, the ideal becomes a clouded

memory. Other teachers succeed in training facility, skill, mastery of

the technique of subjects. Again it is well--so far. But unless

enlargement of mental vision, power of increased discrimination of final

values, a sense for ideas--for principles--accompanies this training,

forms of skill ready to be put indifferently to any end may be the

result. Such modes of technical skill may display themselves, according

to circumstances, as cleverness in serving self-interest, as docility in

carrying out the purposes of others, or as unimaginative plodding in

ruts. To nurture inspiring aim and executive means into harmony with

each other is at once the difficulty and the reward of the teacher.

Sec. 3. _The Far and the Near_

[Sidenote: "Familiarity breeds contempt,"]

Teachers who have heard that they should avoid matters foreign to

pupils' experience, are frequently surprised to find pupils wake up when

something beyond their ken is introduced, while they remain apathetic in

considering the familiar. In geography, the child upon the plains seems

perversely irresponsive to the intellectual charms of his local

environment, and fascinated by whatever concerns mountains or the sea.

Teachers who have struggled with little avail to extract from pupils

essays describing the details of things with which they are well

acquainted, sometimes find them eager to write on lofty or imaginary

themes. A woman of education, who has recorded her experience as a

factory worker, tried retelling _Little Women_ to some factory girls

during their working hours. They cared little for it, saying, "Those

girls had no more interesting experience than we have," and demanded

stories of millionaires and society leaders. A man interested in the

mental condition of those engaged in routine labor asked a Scotch girl

in a cotton factory what she thought about all day. She replied that as

soon as her mind was free from starting the machinery, she married a

duke, and their fortunes occupied her for the remainder of the day.

[Sidenote: since only the novel demands attention,]

Naturally, these incidents are not told in order to encourage methods of

teaching that appeal to the sensational, the extraordinary, or the

incomprehensible. They are told, however, to enforce the point that the

familiar and the near do not excite or repay thought on their own

account, but only as they are adjusted to mastering the strange and

remote. It is a commonplace of psychology that we do not attend to the

old, nor consciously mind that to which we are thoroughly accustomed.

For this, there is good reason: to devote attention to the old, when new

circumstances are constantly arising to which we should adjust

ourselves, would be wasteful and dangerous. Thought must be reserved for

the new, the precarious, the problematic. Hence the mental constraint,

the sense of being lost, that comes to pupils when they are invited to

turn their thoughts upon that with which they are already familiar. The

old, the near, the accustomed, is not that _to_ which but that _with_

which we attend; it does not furnish the material of a problem, but of

its solution.

[Sidenote: which, in turn, can be given only through the old]

The last sentence has brought us to the balancing of new and old, of the

far and that close by, involved in reflection. The more remote supplies

the stimulus and the motive; the nearer at hand furnishes the point of

approach and the available resources. This principle may also be stated

in this form: the best thinking occurs when the easy and the difficult

are duly proportioned to each other. The easy and the familiar are

equivalents, as are the strange and the difficult. Too much that is easy

gives no ground for inquiry; too much of the hard renders inquiry

hopeless.

[Sidenote: The given and the suggested]

The necessity of the interaction of the near and the far follows

directly from the nature of thinking. Where there is thought, something

present suggests and indicates something absent. Accordingly unless the

familiar is presented under conditions that are in some respect

unusual, it gives no jog to thinking, it makes no demand upon what is

not present in order to be understood. And if the subject presented is

totally strange, there is no basis upon which it may suggest anything

serviceable for its comprehension. When a person first has to do with

fractions, for example, they will be wholly baffling so far as they do

not signify to him some relation that he has already mastered in dealing

with whole numbers. When fractions have become thoroughly familiar, his

perception of them acts simply as a signal to do certain things; they

are a "substitute sign," to which he can react without thinking.

(_Ante_, p. 178.) If, nevertheless, the situation as a whole presents

something novel and hence uncertain, the entire response is not

mechanical, because this mechanical operation is put to use in solving a

problem. There is no end to this spiral process: foreign subject-matter

transformed through thinking into a familiar possession becomes a

resource for judging and assimilating additional foreign subject-matter.

[Sidenote: Observation supplies the near, imagination the remote]

The need for both imagination and observation in every mental enterprise

illustrates another aspect of the same principle. Teachers who have

tried object-lessons of the conventional type have usually found that

when the lessons were new, pupils were attracted to them as a diversion,

but as soon as they became matters of course they were as dull and

wearisome as was ever the most mechanical study of mere symbols.

Imagination could not play about the objects so as to enrich them. The

feeling that instruction in "facts, facts" produces a narrow Gradgrind

is justified not because facts in themselves are limiting, but because

facts are dealt out as such hard and fast ready-made articles as to

leave no room to imagination. Let the facts be presented so as to

stimulate imagination, and culture ensues naturally enough. The converse

is equally true. The imaginative is not necessarily the imaginary; that

is, the unreal. The proper function of imagination is vision of

realities that cannot be exhibited under existing conditions of

sense-perception. Clear insight into the remote, the absent, the obscure

is its aim. History, literature, and geography, the principles of

science, nay, even geometry and arithmetic, are full of matters that

must be imaginatively realized if they are realized at all. Imagination

supplements and deepens observation; only when it turns into the

fanciful does it become a substitute for observation and lose logical

force.

[Sidenote: Experience through communication of others' experience]

A final exemplification of the required balance between near and far is

found in the relation that obtains between the narrower field of

experience realized in an individual's own contact with persons and

things, and the wider experience of the race that may become his through

communication. Instruction always runs the risk of swamping the pupil's

own vital, though narrow, experience under masses of communicated

material. The instructor ceases and the teacher begins at the point

where communicated matter stimulates into fuller and more significant

life that which has entered by the strait and narrow gate of

sense-perception and motor activity. Genuine communication involves

contagion; its name should not be taken in vain by terming communication

that which produces no community of thought and purpose between the

child and the race of which he is the heir.

INDEX

Abstract, 135-144

Abstraction, 155 f.

Action, activity, activities, 46, 140 f., 157-169, 190 f.

Active attitude and the concept, 128

Analysis, 111-115, 152 f.;

in education, 112

Apperception, 199;

apperceptive masses, 203

Application, 129 f., 212 f.

Apprehension, 119 f.;

_see_ Understanding.

Artist, attitude of, 219 f.

Articulation, 3

Authority, 4, 25

Bacon, 22, 25, 33

Bain, 155

Balance, 38

Behavior, 5, 42-4, 54 f.;

_see_ Action, Occupations

Belief, 1, 3-7;

reached indirectly, 18

Central factor in thinking, 7

Children, 42 f.

Clifford, 148

Coherence, 3, 80

Comparison, 89 f., 202

Comprehension, 120;

_see_ Understanding.

Concentration, 40

Concept, conception, 107, 125-9, 213;

_see_ Meaning.

Conclusion, 3, 5 f., 40, 77, 80 f.;

technique of, 87 f.

Concrete, 135-44

Congruity, 3, 72

Connection, 7;

_see_ Relation.

Consecutive, 2, 40, 42

Consequence, consequential, 2;

consequences, 5

Consistency, 40

Continuity, 3, 40, 80

Control, 18-28;

of deduction, 93-100;

of induction, 84-93;

of suggestion, 84 f., 93;

_see_ Regulation.

Corroborate, corroboration, 9, 77

Curiosity, 31 ff., 105

Darwin, 38, 90, 127

Data, 79 f., 95, 103 f., 106

Decision, 107

Deduction, 79, 93-100, 103;

control of, 93-100

Definition, 130 f.;

definitions, 131-4, 212

Development, of ideas, 83;

_see_ Elaboration, Ratiocination, Reasoning.

Discipline, 63, 78;

formal, 45, 50

Discourse, consecutive, 185 f.

Discovery, inductive, 81, 116

Division, 131

Dogmatism, 149, 198

Doing, 139, 190

Doubt, 6, 9, 13, 102;

_see_ Perplexity, Uncertainty.

Drill, 52, 63

Drudgery, 218

Education, intellectual, 57, 62;

aim of, 143 f., 156

Elaboration, of ideas, 75 f., 84, 94 f., 103, 106, 209;

_see_ Development, Ratiocination, Reasoning.

Emerson, 173

Emotion, 4, 11, 74

Emphasis, 112, 114 f.

Empirical thinking, 145-9

End, 11 f.

Evidence, 5, 7 f., 27, 103 f.;

_see_ Grounds.

Experience, 132, 156, 199 f., 224

Experiment, experimental, 70 f., 77, 91 f., 99 f., 151 f., 154

Extension, 130 f.

Fact _vs_ idea, 109;

facts, 3, 5

Faculty psychology, 45

Familiar, familiarity, 120-25, 136 f., 206, 214 f., 221 f.

Fooling, 217

Formalism;

_see_ Discipline.

Formal steps of instruction, 202, 206

Formulation, 112 f., 209, 212, 214-17

Freedom, 64 f.;

intellectual, 66

Function, 123;

function of signifying, 7, 15

General 80, 82, 99, 182 f.;

_see_ Principles, Universal.

Generality, 129, 134

Generalization, 211 f.

Grounds, 1, 4-8, 80;

_see_ Evidence.

Guiding factor in reflection, 11

Habits;

_see_ Action.

Herbart, 202

Herbartian method, 202-6

Hobhouse, 31

Hypothesis, 5, 75, 77, 81 f., 94 f., 108, 209

Idea, 75, 77, 79, 107-10;

_see_ Meaning.

Idle thinking, 2

Image, 109

Imagination, 165 f., 223 f.

Imitation, 47, 51, 160

Implication, 5, 75, 77

Impulse, 64

Induction, 79-93, 103;

control of, 84-93;

scientific, 86

Inference, 26 f., 75, 77, 101;

critical, 74, 82;

systematic, 81

Information, 52 f., 197-200

Inquiry, 5, 9 f.

Intellect, intellectual activity, 44, 50, 62

Intension, 130 f.

Internal congruity, 3

Isolation, 96-100, 117, 191

James, 119, 121, 153 f.

Jevons, 91 f., 183, 192

Judgment, 5;

factors of, 101;

good judgment, 101, 103, 106 f.;

and inference, 101 ff.;

intuitive, 104 f.;

principles of, 106 f.;

suspended, 74, 82, 105, 108;

tentative, 101

Knowledge, 3 f., 6, 95;

spiral movement of, 120, 223

Language, 170-87;

and education, 176-87;

and meaning, 171;

technical, 184 f.;

as a tool of thought, 170 ff., 179

Leap, in inference, 26, 75

Leisure, 209 f.

Locke, 19 n., 22-5

Logical, 56 f.;

_vs._ psychological, 62 f.

Meaning, meanings, 7, 17, 79 f., 82, 94, 116-34;

capital fund of, store of, 118, 120, 126, 161, 174, 180;

individual, 173 f.;

organization of, 175, 185;

as tools, keys, instruments, 108 f., 120, 125 f., 129;

_See_ Concept.

Memory, 107

Method, 46-50, 58;

analytic and synthetic, 114;

formal, 60

Mill, 18 n.

Mood, 5

Motivation, 42

Negative cases, 90

Notion. _See_ Concept.

Object lessons, 140, 192

Observation, 3, 7, 69 f., 76 f., 85, 91, 96, 188-97, 223 f.;

in schools, 193-7;

scientific, 196

Occupation, occupations, 43, 99, 167 f.

Openmindedness, 219

Order, orderliness, 2, 39, 41, 46, 57;

_see_ Consecutive.

Organization, 39, 41;

of subject matter, 62

Originality, 198

Particulars, 80, 82;

_cf._ General, Universal.

Passion, 4, 23, 25, 106

Perception, 3, 190;

_cf._ Observation

Perplexity, 9, 11, 72

Placing, 114, 126

Play, 161-7, 217-21;

of mind, 219

Playfulness, 162, 218 f.

Practical deliberation, 68 f.

Prejudice, 4

Principles, 212 f.

Problem, 9, 12, 33, 72, 74, 76, 109, 120, 191 f., 199, 207

Proof, 7, 27, 81

Pseudo-idea, 109

Psychological (_vs._ logical), 62 f.

Purpose, 11

Ratiocination, 75 f., 83

Reason, reasoning, 75-8, 94 f., 98

Reasons, 5 f.

Recitation, 201-13;

factors in, 206-13

Reflection, 2 f., 5 f.;

central function of, 116;

double movement of, 79-84;

five steps in, 72-8, 203 f.

Regulation, 18-28;

_see_ Control.

Relation, relationship, 82, 97;

_see_ Connection.

Scientific thinking, 145-6

Sense training, 190-97

Sequence, 2; _cf._ Consequence.

Sidgwick, 127

Signify, 7, 15

Signs, 16, 171-6

Spiral movement, _see_ Knowledge.

Stimulus-response, 47

Studies, types of, 50

Subject matter, 58 f.;

intellectual, 45 f.;

logical, 61 f.;

practical, 49;

theoretical, 49;

and the teacher, 204 f.

Substitute signs, 177 f., 223

Succession, 3

Suggestion, 7, 12, 27, 74 f., 84 f.;

control of, 84 f., 93;

dimensions of, 34-7

Supposition, 4, 9

Suspense of judgment, 13, 74, 82

Symbols, _see_ Signs.

Synthesis, 114 f.

Terms, 3, 72 f., 76, 79, 95

Testing, 9, 13, 41, 82, 116;

of deduction, 96, 99

Theory, 138

Theoretical, 137

Thinking, complete, 96, 98 f., 100;

_see_ Reasoning, Reflection.

Thought, 8 f.;

educative value of, 2;

reflective, 2;

train of, 3;

types of, 1

Truth, truths, 3

Uncertainty, _see_ Doubt, Perplexity.

Unconscious, 214 ff.

Uncritical thinking, 12

Understanding, 116-20;

direct and indirect, 118-20, 136

Universal, 9

Vagueness, 129 f., 182, 212

Vailati, 81 n.

Venn, 17

Verification, 77

Vocabulary, 180-4

Ward, 110 n.

Warrant, 7

Wisdom, 52

Wonder, 31, 33 f.

Wordsworth, 31

Work, 162-7, 217-19