In the first place, teaching is not simply telling. A class may be told
a thing twenty times over, and yet not know it. Talking to a class is
not necessarily teaching. I have known many teachers who were brimful of
information, and were good talkers, and who discoursed to their classes
with ready utterance a large part of the time allotted to instruction;
yet an examination of their classes showed little advancement in
knowledge.
There are several time-honored metaphors on this subject, which need to
be received with some grains of allowance, if we would get at an exact
idea of what teaching is. Chiselling the rude marble into the finished
statue; giving the impression of the seal upon the soft wax; pouring
water into an empty vessel;--all these comparisons lack one essential
element of likeness. The mind is, indeed, in one sense, empty, and needs
to be filled. It is yielding, and needs to be impressed. It is rude, and
needs polishing. But it is not, like the marble, the wax, or the vessel,
a passive recipient of external influences. It is itself a living
power. It is acted upon only by stirring up its own activities. The
operative upon mind, unlike the operative upon matter, must have the
active, voluntary co-operation of that upon which he works. The teacher
is doing his work, only so far as he gets work from the scholar. The
very essence and root of the work are in the scholar, not in the
teacher. No one, in fact, in an important sense, is taught at all,
except so far as he is self-taught. The teacher may be useful, as an
auxiliary, in causing this action on the part of the scholar. But the
one, indispensable, vital thing in all learning, is in the scholar
himself. The old Romans, in their word education (_educere_, to draw
out), seem to have come nearer to the true idea than any other people
have done. The teacher is to draw out the resources of the pupil. Yet
even this word comes short of the exact truth. The teacher must put in,
as well as draw out. No process of mere pumping will draw out from a
child's mind knowledge which is not there. All the power of the Socratic
method, could it be applied by Socrates himself, would be unavailing to
draw from a child's mind, by mere questioning, a knowledge, for
instance, of chemical affinity, of the solar system, of the temperature
of the Gulf Stream, of the doctrine of the resurrection.
What, then, is teaching?
Teaching is causing any one to know. Now no one can be made to know a
thing but by the act of his own powers. His own senses, his own memory,
his own powers of reason, perception, and judgment, must be exercised.
The function of the teacher is to bring about this exercise of the
pupil's faculties. The means to do this are infinite in variety. They
should be varied according to the wants and the character of the
individual to be taught. One needs to be told a thing; he learns most
readily by the ear. Another needs to use his eyes; he must see a thing,
either in the book, or in nature. But neither eye nor ear, nor any other
sense or faculty, will avail to the acquisition of knowledge, unless the
power of attention is cultivated. Attention, then, is the first act or
power of the mind that must be roused. It is the very foundation of all
progress in knowledge, and the means of awakening it constitute the
first step in the educational art.
When by any means, positive knowledge, facts, are once in possession of
the mind, something must next be done to prevent their slipping away.
You may tell a class the history of a certain event; or you may give
them a description of a certain place or person; or you may let them
read it; and you may secure such a degree of attention, that, at the
time of the reading or the description, they shall have a fair,
intelligible comprehension of what has been described or read. The facts
are for the time actually in the possession of the mind. Now, if the
mind was, according to the old notion, merely a vessel to be filled, the
process would be complete. But mind is not an empty vessel. It is a
living essence, with powers and processes of its own. And experience
shows us, that in the case of a class of undisciplined pupils, facts,
even when fairly placed in the possession of the mind, often remain
there about as long as the shadow of a passing cloud remains upon the
landscape, and make about as much impression.
The teacher must seek, then, not only to get knowledge into the mind,
but to fix it there. In other words, the power of the memory must be
strengthened. Teaching, then, most truly, and in every stage of it, is a
strictly co-operative process. You cannot cause any one to know, by
merely pouring out stores of knowledge in his hearing, any more than you
can make his body grow by spreading the contents of your market-basket
at his feet. You must rouse his power of attention, that he may lay hold
of, and receive, and make his own, the knowledge you offer him. You must
awaken and strengthen the power of memory within him, that he may retain
what he receives, and thus grow in knowledge, as the body by a like
process grows in strength and muscle. In other words, learning, so far
as the mind of the learner is concerned, is a growth; and teaching, so
far as the teacher is concerned, is doing whatever is necessary to cause
that growth.
Let us proceed a step farther in this matter.
One of the ancients observes that a lamp loses none of its own light by
allowing another lamp to be lit from it. He uses the illustration to
enforce the duty of liberality in imparting our knowledge to others.
Knowledge, he says, unlike other treasures, is not diminished by giving.
The illustration fails to express the whole truth. This imparting of
knowledge to others, not only does not impoverish the donor, but it
actually increases his riches. _Docendo discimus._ By teaching we learn.
A man grows in knowledge by the very act of communicating it. The reason
for this is obvious. In order to communicate to the mind of another a
thought which is in our own mind, we must give to the thought definite
shape and form. We must handle it, and pack it up for safe conveyance.
Thus the mere act of giving a thought expression in words, fixes it more
deeply in our own minds. Not only so; we can, in fact, very rarely be
said to be in full possession of a thought ourselves, until by the
tongue or the pen we have communicated it to somebody else. The
expression of it, in some form, seems necessary to give it, even in our
own minds, a definite shape and a lasting impression. A man who devotes
himself to solitary reading and study, but never tries in any way to
communicate his acquisitions to the world, or to enforce his opinions
upon others, rarely becomes a learned man. A great many confused, dreamy
ideas, no doubt, float through the brain of such a man; but he has
little exact and reliable knowledge. The truth is, there is a sort of
indolent, listless absorption of intellectual food, that tends to
idiocy. I knew a person once, a gentleman of wealth and leisure, who
having no taste for social intercourse, and no material wants to be
supplied, which might have required the active exercise of his powers,
gave himself up entirely to solitary reading, as a sort of luxurious
self-indulgence. He shut himself up in his room, all day long, day after
day, devouring one book after another, until he became almost idiotic by
the process, and he finally died of softening of the brain. Had he been
compelled to use his mental acquisitions in earning his bread, or had
the love of Christ constrained him to use them in the instruction of the
poor and the ignorant, he might have become not only a useful, but a
learned man.
We see a beautiful illustration of this doctrine in the case of
Sabbath-school teachers, and one reason why persons so engaged usually
love their work, is the benefit which they find in it for themselves. I
speak here, not of the spiritual, but of the intellectual benefit. By
the process of teaching others, they are all the while learning. This
advantage in their case is all the greater, because it advances them in
a kind of knowledge in which, more than in any other kind of knowledge,
men are wont to become passive and stationary. In ordinary worldly
knowledge, our necessities make us active. The intercourse of business,
and of pleasure even, makes men keen. On these subjects we are all the
while bandying thoughts to and fro; we are accustomed to give as well as
take; and so we keep our intellectual armor bright, and our thoughts
well defined. But in regard to growth in religious knowledge, we have a
tendency to be mere passive recipients, like the young man just referred
to. Sabbath after Sabbath we hear good, instructive, orthodox
discourses, but there is no active putting forth of our own powers in
giving out what we thus take in, and so we never make it effectually our
own. The absorbing process goes on, and yet we make no growth. The
quiescent audience is a sort of exhausted receiver, into which the
stream from the pulpit is perennially playing, but never making it full.
Let a man go back and ask himself, What actual scriptural knowledge have
I gained by the sermons of the last six months? What in fact do I retain
in my mind, at this moment, of the sermons I heard only a month ago? So
far as the hearing of sermons is concerned, the Sabbath-school teacher
may perhaps be no better off than other hearers. But in regard to
general growth in religious knowledge, he advances more rapidly than his
fellow-worshippers, because the exigencies of his class compel him to a
state of mind the very opposite of this passive recipiency. He is
obliged to be all the while, not only learning, but putting his
acquisitions into definite shape for use, and the very act of using
these acquisitions in teaching a class, fixes them in his own mind, and
makes them more surely his own.
I have used this instance of the Sabbath-school teacher because it
enforces an important hint already given, as to the mode of teaching.
Some teachers, especially in Sabbath-schools, seem to be ambitious to do
a great deal of talking. The measure of their success, in their own
eyes, is their ability to keep up a continued stream of talk for the
greater part of the hour. This is of course better than the embarrassing
silence sometimes seen, where neither teacher nor scholar has anything
to say. But at the best, it is only the pouring into the exhausted
receiver enacted over again. We can never be reminded too often, that
there is no teaching except so far as there is active cooperation on the
part of the learner. The mind receiving must reproduce and give back
what it gets. This is the indispensable condition of making any
knowledge really our own. The very best teaching I have ever seen, has
been where the teacher said comparatively little. The teacher was of
course brimful of the subject. He could give the needed information at
exactly the right point, and in the right quantity. But for every word
given by the teacher, there were many words of answering reproduction
on the part of the scholars. Youthful minds under such tutelage grow
apace.
It is indeed a high and difficult achievement in the educational art, to
get young persons thus to bring forth their thoughts freely for
examination and correction. A pleasant countenance and a gentle manner,
inviting and inspiring confidence, have something to do with the matter.
But, whatever the means for accomplishing this end, the end itself is
indispensable. The scholar's tongue must be unloosed, as well as the
teacher's. The scholar's thoughts must be broached, as well as the
teacher's. Indeed, the statement needs very little qualification or
abatement, that a scholar has learned nothing from us except what he has
expressed to us again in words. The teacher who is accustomed to
harangue his scholars with a continuous stream of words, no matter how
full of weighty meaning his words may be, is yet deceiving himself, if
he thinks that his scholars are materially benefited by his intellectual
activity, unless it is so guided as to awaken and exercise theirs. If,
after a suitable period, he will honestly examine his scholars on the
subjects, on which he has himself been so productive, he will find that
he has been only pouring water into a sieve. Teaching can never be this
one-sided process. Of all the things we attempt, it is the one most
essentially and necessarily a cooperative process. There must be the
joint action of the teacher's mind and the scholar's mind. A teacher
teaches at all, only so far as he causes this coactive energy of the
pupil's mind.