1. The Essentials of Method. No one doubts, theoretically, the
importance of fostering in school good habits of thinking. But apart
from the fact that the acknowledgment is not so great in practice as in
theory, there is not adequate theoretical recognition that all which the
school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned
(that is, leaving out certain specialized muscular abilities), is to
develop their ability to think. The parceling out of instruction
among various ends such as acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling,
writing, drawing, reciting); acquiring information (in history and
geography), and training of thinking is a measure of the ineffective way
in which we accomplish all three. Thinking which is not connected with
increase of efficiency in action, and with learning more about ourselves
and the world in which we live, has something the matter with it just
as thought (See ante, p. 147). And skill obtained apart from thinking is
not connected with any sense of the purposes for which it is to be used.
It consequently leaves a man at the mercy of his routine habits and of
the authoritative control of others, who know what they are about and
who are not especially scrupulous as to their means of achievement.
And information severed from thoughtful action is dead, a mind-crushing
load. Since it simulates knowledge and thereby develops the poison of
conceit, it is a most powerful obstacle to further growth in the grace
of intelligence. The sole direct path to enduring improvement in the
methods of instruction and learning consists in centering upon the
conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking. Thinking is the
method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards
mind. We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of thinking, but
the important thing to bear in mind about method is that thinking is
method, the method of intelligent experience in the course which it
takes.
I. The initial stage of that developing experience which is called
thinking is experience. This remark may sound like a silly truism. It
ought to be one; but unfortunately it is not. On the contrary, thinking
is often regarded both in philosophic theory and in educational practice
as something cut off from experience, and capable of being cultivated
in isolation. In fact, the inherent limitations of experience are often
urged as the sufficient ground for attention to thinking. Experience
is then thought to be confined to the senses and appetites; to a mere
material world, while thinking proceeds from a higher faculty (of
reason), and is occupied with spiritual or at least literary things. So,
oftentimes, a sharp distinction is made between pure mathematics as a
peculiarly fit subject matter of thought (since it has nothing to do
with physical existences) and applied mathematics, which has utilitarian
but not mental value.
Speaking generally, the fundamental fallacy in methods of instruction
lies in supposing that experience on the part of pupils may be assumed.
What is here insisted upon is the necessity of an actual empirical
situation as the initiating phase of thought. Experience is here taken
as previously defined: trying to do something and having the thing
perceptibly do something to one in return. The fallacy consists
in supposing that we can begin with ready-made subject matter of
arithmetic, or geography, or whatever, irrespective of some direct
personal experience of a situation. Even the kindergarten and Montessori
techniques are so anxious to get at intellectual distinctions, without
"waste of time," that they tend to ignore--or reduce--the immediate
crude handling of the familiar material of experience, and to introduce
pupils at once to material which expresses the intellectual distinctions
which adults have made. But the first stage of contact with any new
material, at whatever age of maturity, must inevitably be of the trial
and error sort. An individual must actually try, in play or work, to do
something with material in carrying out his own impulsive activity,
and then note the interaction of his energy and that of the material
employed. This is what happens when a child at first begins to build
with blocks, and it is equally what happens when a scientific man in his
laboratory begins to experiment with unfamiliar objects.
Hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is to be
aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic as possible.
To realize what an experience, or empirical situation, means, we have
to call to mind the sort of situation that presents itself outside of
school; the sort of occupations that interest and engage activity in
ordinary life. And careful inspection of methods which are permanently
successful in formal education, whether in arithmetic or learning to
read, or studying geography, or learning physics or a foreign language,
will reveal that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that
they go back to the type of the situation which causes reflection out
of school in ordinary life. They give the pupils something to do, not
something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to demand
thinking, or the intentional noting of connections; learning naturally
results.
That the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse thinking
means of course that it should suggest something to do which is not
either routine or capricious--something, in other words, presenting
what is new (and hence uncertain or problematic) and yet sufficiently
connected with existing habits to call out an effective response. An
effective response means one which accomplishes a perceptible result,
in distinction from a purely haphazard activity, where the consequences
cannot be mentally connected with what is done. The most significant
question which can be asked, accordingly, about any situation or
experience proposed to induce learning is what quality of problem it
involves.
At first thought, it might seem as if usual school methods measured
well up to the standard here set. The giving of problems, the putting of
questions, the assigning of tasks, the magnifying of difficulties, is
a large part of school work. But it is indispensable to discriminate
between genuine and simulated or mock problems. The following questions
may aid in making such discrimination. (a) Is there anything but
a problem? Does the question naturally suggest itself within some
situation or personal experience? Or is it an aloof thing, a problem
only for the purposes of conveying instruction in some school topic?
Is it the sort of trying that would arouse observation and engage
experimentation outside of school? (b) Is it the pupil's own problem, or
is it the teacher's or textbook's problem, made a problem for the pupil
only because he cannot get the required mark or be promoted or win
the teacher's approval, unless he deals with it? Obviously, these two
questions overlap. They are two ways of getting at the same point:
Is the experience a personal thing of such a nature as inherently to
stimulate and direct observation of the connections involved, and to
lead to inference and its testing? Or is it imposed from without, and
is the pupil's problem simply to meet the external requirement? Such
questions may give us pause in deciding upon the extent to which
current practices are adapted to develop reflective habits. The physical
equipment and arrangements of the average schoolroom are hostile to the
existence of real situations of experience. What is there similar to
the conditions of everyday life which will generate difficulties? Almost
everything testifies to the great premium put upon listening, reading,
and the reproduction of what is told and read. It is hardly possible
to overstate the contrast between such conditions and the situations of
active contact with things and persons in the home, on the playground,
in fulfilling of ordinary responsibilities of life. Much of it is not
even comparable with the questions which may arise in the mind of a boy
or girl in conversing with others or in reading books outside of the
school. No one has ever explained why children are so full of questions
outside of the school (so that they pester grown-up persons if they get
any encouragement), and the conspicuous absence of display of curiosity
about the subject matter of school lessons. Reflection on this striking
contrast will throw light upon the question of how far customary school
conditions supply a context of experience in which problems naturally
suggest themselves. No amount of improvement in the personal technique
of the instructor will wholly remedy this state of things. There must
be more actual material, more stuff, more appliances, and more
opportunities for doing things, before the gap can be overcome. And
where children are engaged in doing things and in discussing what arises
in the course of their doing, it is found, even with comparatively
indifferent modes of instruction, that children's inquiries are
spontaneous and numerous, and the proposals of solution advanced,
varied, and ingenious.
As a consequence of the absence of the materials and occupations which
generate real problems, the pupil's problems are not his; or, rather,
they are his only as a pupil, not as a human being. Hence the lamentable
waste in carrying over such expertness as is achieved in dealing
with them to the affairs of life beyond the schoolroom. A pupil has a
problem, but it is the problem of meeting the peculiar requirements set
by the teacher. His problem becomes that of finding out what the teacher
wants, what will satisfy the teacher in recitation and examination and
outward deportment. Relationship to subject matter is no longer direct.
The occasions and material of thought are not found in the arithmetic
or the history or geography itself, but in skillfully adapting
that material to the teacher's requirements. The pupil studies, but
unconsciously to himself the objects of his study are the conventions
and standards of the school system and school authority, not the nominal
"studies." The thinking thus evoked is artificially one-sided at the
best. At its worst, the problem of the pupil is not how to meet the
requirements of school life, but how to seem to meet them--or, how to
come near enough to meeting them to slide along without an undue amount
of friction. The type of judgment formed by these devices is not a
desirable addition to character. If these statements give too highly
colored a picture of usual school methods, the exaggeration may at least
serve to illustrate the point: the need of active pursuits, involving
the use of material to accomplish purposes, if there are to be
situations which normally generate problems occasioning thoughtful
inquiry.
II. There must be data at command to supply the considerations required
in dealing with the specific difficulty which has presented itself.
Teachers following a "developing" method sometimes tell children to
think things out for themselves as if they could spin them out of their
own heads. The material of thinking is not thoughts, but actions,
facts, events, and the relations of things. In other words, to think
effectively one must have had, or now have, experiences which will
furnish him resources for coping with the difficulty at hand. A
difficulty is an indispensable stimulus to thinking, but not all
difficulties call out thinking. Sometimes they overwhelm and submerge
and discourage. The perplexing situation must be sufficiently like
situations which have already been dealt with so that pupils will have
some control of the meanings of handling it. A large part of the art of
instruction lies in making the difficulty of new problems large enough
to challenge thought, and small enough so that, in addition to the
confusion naturally attending the novel elements, there shall be
luminous familiar spots from which helpful suggestions may spring.
In one sense, it is a matter of indifference by what psychological means
the subject matter for reflection is provided. Memory, observation,
reading, communication, are all avenues for supplying data. The relative
proportion to be obtained from each is a matter of the specific
features of the particular problem in hand. It is foolish to insist
upon observation of objects presented to the senses if the student is
so familiar with the objects that he could just as well recall the facts
independently. It is possible to induce undue and crippling dependence
upon sense-presentations. No one can carry around with him a museum of
all the things whose properties will assist the conduct of thought. A
well-trained mind is one that has a maximum of resources behind it, so
to speak, and that is accustomed to go over its past experiences to
see what they yield. On the other hand, a quality or relation of even
a familiar object may previously have been passed over, and be just the
fact that is helpful in dealing with the question. In this case direct
observation is called for. The same principle applies to the use to
be made of observation on one hand and of reading and "telling" on the
other. Direct observation is naturally more vivid and vital. But it has
its limitations; and in any case it is a necessary part of education
that one should acquire the ability to supplement the narrowness of his
immediately personal experiences by utilizing the experiences of others.
Excessive reliance upon others for data (whether got from reading
or listening) is to be depreciated. Most objectionable of all is the
probability that others, the book or the teacher, will supply solutions
ready-made, instead of giving material that the student has to adapt and
apply to the question in hand for himself.
There is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is usually
both too much and too little information supplied by others. The
accumulation and acquisition of information for purposes of reproduction
in recitation and examination is made too much of. "Knowledge," in
the sense of information, means the working capital, the indispensable
resources, of further inquiry; of finding out, or learning, more things.
Frequently it is treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes
to heap it up and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage
ideal of knowledge is inimical to educative development. It not only
lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking. No one
could construct a house on ground cluttered with miscellaneous junk.
Pupils who have stored their "minds" with all kinds of material which
they have never put to intellectual uses are sure to be hampered
when they try to think. They have no practice in selecting what is
appropriate, and no criterion to go by; everything is on the same dead
static level. On the other hand, it is quite open to question whether,
if information actually functioned in experience through use in
application to the student's own purposes, there would not be need of
more varied resources in books, pictures, and talks than are usually at
command.
III. The correlate in thinking of facts, data, knowledge already
acquired, is suggestions, inferences, conjectured meanings,
suppositions, tentative explanations:--ideas, in short. Careful
observation and recollection determine what is given, what is already
there, and hence assured. They cannot furnish what is lacking. They
define, clarify, and locate the question; they cannot supply its answer.
Projection, invention, ingenuity, devising come in for that purpose. The
data arouse suggestions, and only by reference to the specific data can
we pass upon the appropriateness of the suggestions. But the suggestions
run beyond what is, as yet, actually given in experience. They forecast
possible results, things to do, not facts (things already done).
Inference is always an invasion of the unknown, a leap from the known.
In this sense, a thought (what a thing suggests but is not as it is
presented) is creative,--an incursion into the novel. It involves some
inventiveness. What is suggested must, indeed, be familiar in some
context; the novelty, the inventive devising, clings to the new light
in which it is seen, the different use to which it is put. When Newton
thought of his theory of gravitation, the creative aspect of his
thought was not found in its materials. They were familiar; many of
them commonplaces--sun, moon, planets, weight, distance, mass, square of
numbers. These were not original ideas; they were established facts. His
originality lay in the use to which these familiar acquaintances were
put by introduction into an unfamiliar context. The same is true of
every striking scientific discovery, every great invention, every
admirable artistic production. Only silly folk identify creative
originality with the extraordinary and fanciful; others recognize
that its measure lies in putting everyday things to uses which had not
occurred to others. The operation is novel, not the materials out of
which it is constructed.
The educational conclusion which follows is that all thinking is
original in a projection of considerations which have not been
previously apprehended. The child of three who discovers what can be
done with blocks, or of six who finds out what he can make by putting
five cents and five cents together, is really a discoverer, even though
everybody else in the world knows it. There is a genuine increment of
experience; not another item mechanically added on, but enrichment by a
new quality. The charm which the spontaneity of little children has
for sympathetic observers is due to perception of this intellectual
originality. The joy which children themselves experience is the joy of
intellectual constructiveness--of creativeness, if the word may be used
without misunderstanding. The educational moral I am chiefly concerned
to draw is not, however, that teachers would find their own work less of
a grind and strain if school conditions favored learning in the sense
of discovery and not in that of storing away what others pour into
them; nor that it would be possible to give even children and youth the
delights of personal intellectual productiveness--true and important
as are these things. It is that no thought, no idea, can possibly be
conveyed as an idea from one person to another. When it is told, it
is, to the one to whom it is told, another given fact, not an idea. The
communication may stimulate the other person to realize the question for
himself and to think out a like idea, or it may smother his intellectual
interest and suppress his dawning effort at thought. But what he
directly gets cannot be an idea. Only by wrestling with the conditions
of the problem at first hand, seeking and finding his own way out, does
he think. When the parent or teacher has provided the conditions which
stimulate thinking and has taken a sympathetic attitude toward the
activities of the learner by entering into a common or conjoint
experience, all has been done which a second party can do to instigate
learning. The rest lies with the one directly concerned. If he
cannot devise his own solution (not of course in isolation, but in
correspondence with the teacher and other pupils) and find his own way
out he will not learn, not even if he can recite some correct answer
with one hundred per cent accuracy. We can and do supply ready-made
"ideas" by the thousand; we do not usually take much pains to see
that the one learning engages in significant situations where his own
activities generate, support, and clinch ideas--that is, perceived
meanings or connections. This does not mean that the teacher is to stand
off and look on; the alternative to furnishing ready-made subject
matter and listening to the accuracy with which it is reproduced is not
quiescence, but participation, sharing, in an activity. In such shared
activity, the teacher is a learner, and the learner is, without knowing
it, a teacher--and upon the whole, the less consciousness there is, on
either side, of either giving or receiving instruction, the better.
IV. Ideas, as we have seen, whether they be humble guesses or
dignified theories, are anticipations of possible solutions. They are
anticipations of some continuity or connection of an activity and a
consequence which has not as yet shown itself. They are therefore tested
by the operation of acting upon them. They are to guide and organize
further observations, recollections, and experiments. They are
intermediate in learning, not final. All educational reformers, as we
have had occasion to remark, are given to attacking the passivity of
traditional education. They have opposed pouring in from without, and
absorbing like a sponge; they have attacked drilling in material as into
hard and resisting rock. But it is not easy to secure conditions which
will make the getting of an idea identical with having an experience
which widens and makes more precise our contact with the environment.
Activity, even self-activity, is too easily thought of as something
merely mental, cooped up within the head, or finding expression only
through the vocal organs.
While the need of application of ideas gained in study is acknowledged
by all the more successful methods of instruction, the exercises in
application are sometimes treated as devices for fixing what has
already been learned and for getting greater practical skill in its
manipulation. These results are genuine and not to be despised. But
practice in applying what has been gained in study ought primarily to
have an intellectual quality. As we have already seen, thoughts just
as thoughts are incomplete. At best they are tentative; they are
suggestions, indications. They are standpoints and methods for dealing
with situations of experience. Till they are applied in these situations
they lack full point and reality. Only application tests them, and only
testing confers full meaning and a sense of their reality. Short of use
made of them, they tend to segregate into a peculiar world of their
own. It may be seriously questioned whether the philosophies (to which
reference has been made in section 2 of chapter X) which isolate mind
and set it over against the world did not have their origin in the fact
that the reflective or theoretical class of men elaborated a large stock
of ideas which social conditions did not allow them to act upon and
test. Consequently men were thrown back into their own thoughts as ends
in themselves.
However this may be, there can be no doubt that a peculiar artificiality
attaches to much of what is learned in schools. It can hardly be said
that many students consciously think of the subject matter as unreal;
but it assuredly does not possess for them the kind of reality which the
subject matter of their vital experiences possesses. They learn not to
expect that sort of reality of it; they become habituated to treating
it as having reality for the purposes of recitations, lessons, and
examinations. That it should remain inert for the experiences of daily
life is more or less a matter of course. The bad effects are twofold.
Ordinary experience does not receive the enrichment which it should;
it is not fertilized by school learning. And the attitudes which spring
from getting used to and accepting half-understood and ill-digested
material weaken vigor and efficiency of thought.
If we have dwelt especially on the negative side, it is for the sake
of suggesting positive measures adapted to the effectual development
of thought. Where schools are equipped with laboratories, shops,
and gardens, where dramatizations, plays, and games are freely used,
opportunities exist for reproducing situations of life, and for
acquiring and applying information and ideas in the carrying forward of
progressive experiences. Ideas are not segregated, they do not form an
isolated island. They animate and enrich the ordinary course of life.
Information is vitalized by its function; by the place it occupies in
direction of action. The phrase "opportunities exist" is used purposely.
They may not be taken advantage of; it is possible to employ manual
and constructive activities in a physical way, as means of getting just
bodily skill; or they may be used almost exclusively for "utilitarian,"
i.e., pecuniary, ends. But the disposition on the part of upholders of
"cultural" education to assume that such activities are merely physical
or professional in quality, is itself a product of the philosophies
which isolate mind from direction of the course of experience and hence
from action upon and with things. When the "mental" is regarded as
a self-contained separate realm, a counterpart fate befalls bodily
activity and movements. They are regarded as at the best mere external
annexes to mind. They may be necessary for the satisfaction of bodily
needs and the attainment of external decency and comfort, but they do
not occupy a necessary place in mind nor enact an indispensable role
in the completion of thought. Hence they have no place in a liberal
education--i.e., one which is concerned with the interests of
intelligence. If they come in at all, it is as a concession to the
material needs of the masses. That they should be allowed to invade
the education of the elite is unspeakable. This conclusion follows
irresistibly from the isolated conception of mind, but by the same
logic it disappears when we perceive what mind really is--namely, the
purposive and directive factor in the development of experience. While
it is desirable that all educational institutions should be equipped so
as to give students an opportunity for acquiring and testing ideas and
information in active pursuits typifying important social situations, it
will, doubtless, be a long time before all of them are thus furnished.
But this state of affairs does not afford instructors an excuse for
folding their hands and persisting in methods which segregate school
knowledge. Every recitation in every subject gives an opportunity for
establishing cross connections between the subject matter of the lesson
and the wider and more direct experiences of everyday life. Classroom
instruction falls into three kinds. The least desirable treats each
lesson as an independent whole. It does not put upon the student the
responsibility of finding points of contact between it and other lessons
in the same subject, or other subjects of study. Wiser teachers see to
it that the student is systematically led to utilize his earlier lessons
to help understand the present one, and also to use the present to
throw additional light upon what has already been acquired. Results are
better, but school subject matter is still isolated. Save by accident,
out-of-school experience is left in its crude and comparatively
irreflective state. It is not subject to the refining and expanding
influences of the more accurate and comprehensive material of direct
instruction. The latter is not motivated and impregnated with a sense of
reality by being intermingled with the realities of everyday life. The
best type of teaching bears in mind the desirability of affecting this
interconnection. It puts the student in the habitual attitude of finding
points of contact and mutual bearings.
Summary. Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which
they center in the production of good habits of thinking. While we may
speak, without error, of the method of thought, the important thing is
that thinking is the method of an educative experience. The essentials
of method are therefore identical with the essentials of reflection.
They are first that the pupil have a genuine situation of
experience--that there be a continuous activity in which he is
interested for its own sake; secondly, that a genuine problem develop
within this situation as a stimulus to thought; third, that he possess
the information and make the observations needed to deal with it;
fourth, that suggested solutions occur to him which he shall be
responsible for developing in an orderly way; fifth, that he have
opportunity and occasion to test his ideas by application, to make their
meaning clear and to discover for himself their validity.