not be despised or neglected. They are helpful in forming concepts of
that which cannot be brought before a class. When made by the learner
himself, as a result of his own work, they serve to clarify his thinking,
and furnish a sure test of the pupil’s progress and of the teacher’s
skill as a guide and instructor. A drawing, or even a statement in the
pupil’s own words, is often an astonishing revelation of the crude
notions which pictures give. The city lad who said that a cow was no
bigger than a finger-nail because he had often measured its size in the
First Reader is a typical example. The ability to interpret pictures
and descriptions comes from actual knowledge of things similar to what
is depicted or described. The noted teacher, Agassiz, made a difference
in his directions to beginners and advanced students. To the former he
would give specimens, with directions to study them without referring
to a book. Having taught them how to use their eyes, he would gradually
lead them to the method of interpreting and verifying the statements of
an author. And when the advanced student was set to work at original
investigations, he was told to study certain books, as it would save
much valuable time. One of his pupils writes, “I shall never forget a
forceful lesson given me by the great Agassiz, when I studied with him
in the Museum of Cambridge. I worked near a young man from Cleveland,
Ohio, who has since achieved distinction as a teacher of biology. I
was comparatively a beginner, however, while he was well advanced in
his studies. On a certain day Agassiz came sauntering by, and stopped
long enough to tell me not to use the library so much, but to confine
myself to observations of the specimens on hand and the writing of my
observations and comments. Passing on a little farther, he spoke to my
friend and said, ‘Albert, when you go home, this summer, to Cleveland, I
wish you would make a special study of a certain kind of fish found in
the harbor there. It is not found plentifully anywhere else in the world.
Take a row-boat and go three hundred yards northeast of the point of the
breakwater, and you will find them in abundance. Before going home, get
the only three books ever written on this fish from the library here and
read them. It will save your time to read them before beginning to study
the fish itself.’”[3] Agassiz was as anxious to teach the right use of
books as is the professor of literature; but he adapted his directions
to the degree of advancement which his students had attained, and did
not neglect the formation of the basal concepts and the habits of study
needful in the sciences he taught.
[Sidenote: Botany.]
How little the exhortations of our educational reformers have been
taken to heart by some teachers is evident from the recent experiences
of a normal school principal, who had great difficulty in finding a
satisfactory teacher of botany. The students could invariably answer
the questions of the State Board of Examiners by filling pages of
manuscript with technical terms. In the field they could not distinguish
one plant from another. In despair, the principal said to his teacher
of psychology, “Why can we not apply common sense to the teaching of
botany? Can we not plant seeds, watch their growth, and study the growing
specimens instead of the pictures in a text-book?” “If you will give me
the class in botany, I will try it,” was the reply. Before the next class
took up botany, every chalk-box was emptied and every flower-pot utilized
in the planting of seeds. In no long time there appeared on the fences
of neighboring farms sign-boards with the inscription, “Trespassing on
these fields is forbidden, under penalty of the law.” The members of the
class were traversing the country, studying the real flowers, the growing
plants, instead of the technical terms of a text-book. At the next final
examination, the herbarium which each one had prepared, together with the
accompanying analysis and drawings of parts which could not be described,
including colorings in imitation of the actual colors of the flowers,
gave evidence of real knowledge, and served to satisfy the examiners,
although the array of technical terms was far less formidable.
If violations of the fundamental laws of teaching occur in our higher
institutions of learning, what may we not expect in the lower schools
where the teaching is intrusted to young people of limited education?
Nevertheless, it is a notorious fact that the worst forms of teaching
are found in our higher institutions of learning, where many of the
professors seem to know as little of the science of education as the
motorman knows of the science of electricity; otherwise they would make
impossible the use of “ponies, coaches, and keys,” by means of which the
student taxes the memory rather than the understanding, and ultimately
loses all power of independent thought and investigation. Such helps
arrest mental development, destroy the power of original thinking, and
do more harm than the practice of feeding the mind with mere verbal
statements which in course of time may acquire content and meaning. The
study of the sciences which classify minerals, plants, insects, birds,
fishes, and other animals may degenerate into a mere study of words,
even when the student acquires some familiarity with the specimens to
be classified. The scientific name is the one thing about a flower with
which the Creator has had nothing to do, and if the recognition of the
scientific name is the chief or sole aim of the student of botany, it is
a genuine case of feeding the mind on words.
[Sidenote: Words as material for thought.]
[Sidenote: Geometry as thought-material.]
By those who are fond of scientific pursuits the dead languages are
sometimes despised as though the study of them were learned playing with
mere words. Among people who begin their education somewhat late in life
there is a strong temptation to estimate linguistic studies very far
below their true value as a means for disciplining the reasoning faculty.
When pursued in the right way, the study of the classical languages
furnishes as much good material for thought as the natural sciences.
Huxley may charm an audience by a lecture on a piece of chalk; the
philologist can excite equal interest by a lecture on the word chalk.
Words grow and undergo changes according to well-defined laws which
furnish as much food for thought as the laws governing the union of atoms
or the motions of the heavenly bodies. The words of a lexicon contain
as much of precious interest in the sight of man as the manufactured
gases or the plucked leaves and dissected flowers of the laboratory.
Greek and Latin roots have more vitality in them than the collections of
stones, stuffed birds, and transfixed bugs in the museum. The endings
of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs furnish ample opportunity for
observation, comparison, and reflection; their functions in the syntax
of the sentence furnish splendid exercises in formal and qualitative
thinking. If, however, the time of the pupil is entirely consumed in
mastering the hundreds of exceptions to the rules of gender and case,
of declensions and conjugations, of syntax and prosody, it is another
sad instance of feeding the mind on mere words. The pupil who begins the
study of any foreign language before he has reached his teens should
acquire the power to read the language at sight; otherwise there has been
something faulty in the methods of teaching or of study, or in both. A
man is as many times a man as he knows languages; and the comparison of
the idioms of two or more languages furnishes most excellent material
for careful and accurate thinking. In translating an author like Plato
the student must think the thoughts of a master mind, weigh words so as
to detect the finer shades of meaning, and arrange them in sentences
that shall adequately express the meaning of the original. The value
of pure mathematics, especially the Euclidian geometry, as a means for
the cultivation of thinking, lies in the limited number of fundamental
concepts which must be clearly fixed and in the nature of the reasoning
by which the truth of the theorems is established. The axioms are few
in number and easily grasped; the quantities to be defined can, without
difficulty, be set in a clear light before the understanding; the chain
of proof compels the mind to join ideas by their logical nexus, and if
the learner persists in memorizing the demonstration, he is at once
detected. And yet when, as sometimes happens, he goes over several books
of geometry without clearly perceiving the difference between an angle
and a triangle, it must be a genuine specimen of acquiring words without
the corresponding ideas.
[Sidenote: S. S. Greene’s views.]
The words of S. S. Greene deserve the attention of every teacher anxious
to prevent the formation of vicious habits of thought by the pupils
in our schools and colleges. Years ago he wrote as follows: “While an
external object may be viewed by thousands in common, the idea or image
of it addresses itself only to the individual consciousness. My idea or
image is mine alone,—the reward of careless observation, if imperfect;
of attentive, careful, and varied observation, if correct. Between mine
and yours a great gulf is fixed. No man can pass from mine to yours, or
from yours to mine. Neither, in any proper sense of the word, can mine
be conveyed to you. Words do not convey thoughts; they are not vehicles
of thought in any true sense of that term. A word is simply a common
symbol which each associates with his own idea or image. Neither can
I compare mine with yours, except through the mediation of external
objects. And, then, how do I know that they are alike; that a measure
called a foot, for instance, seems as long to you as to me? My idea of
a new object, which you and I observe together, may be very imperfect.
By it I attribute to the object what does not belong to it, take from
it what does, distort its form, and otherwise pervert it. Suppose, now,
at the time of observation we agree upon a word as a sign or symbol
of the object or the idea of it. The object is withdrawn; the idea
only remains,—imperfect in my case, complete and vivid in yours. The
sign is employed. Does it bring back the original object? By no means.
Does it convey my idea to your mind? Nothing of the kind; you would be
disgusted with the shapeless image. Does it convey yours to me? No; I
should be delighted at the sight. What does it effect? It becomes the
occasion for each to call up his own image. Does each now contemplate
the same thing? What multitudes of dissimilar images instantly spring
up at the announcement of the same symbol!—dissimilar not because of
anything in the one source whence they are derived, but because of
either an inattentive and imperfect observation of that source, or some
constitutional or habitual defect in the use of the perceptive faculty.”
[Sidenote: J. P. Gordy’s statement.]
[Sidenote: Pestalozzi’s reform.]
Dr. J. P. Gordy, to whom credit is due for the preceding quotation,
further says, “Words are like paper money; their value depends on
what they stand for. As you would be none the richer for possessing
Confederate money to the amount of a million dollars, so your pupils
would be none the wiser for being able to repeat book after book by
heart, unless the words were the signs of ideas in their minds. Words
without ideas are an irredeemable paper currency. It is the practical
recognition of this truth that has revolutionized the best schools in
the last quarter of a century.... In what did the reform inaugurated
by Pestalozzi consist? In the substitution of the intelligent for the
blind use of words. He reversed the educational engine. Before his time
teachers expected their pupils to go from words to ideas; he taught
them to go from ideas to words. He brought out the fact upon which I
have been insisting,—that words are utterly powerless to create ideas;
that all they can do is to help the pupil to recall and recombine ideas
already formed. With Pestalozzi, therefore, and with those who have been
imbued with his theories, the important matter is the forming of clear
and definite ideas.”[4]
[Sidenote: Sight and insight.]
It was a remark of Goethe that genius begins in the senses. With equal
truth we may say that thinking begins in the senses. Like unto the
genius, the thoughtful man perceives and interprets what has escaped
the notice of other people. To sight he adds insight. That which he
sees is subsumed under the proper class or category, and is viewed from
different sides until its significance is discovered, and a place is
assigned to it in the intellectual horizon and in the external world.
Every fact thus seen in its relation to other facts serves as a basis for
further observation, reflection, and comparison. Not merely the genius,
but every other person whose thinking is above the average in vigor and
accuracy, has the power to perceive things which escape the eyes and
ears of other people. Through habits of careful and correct observation
he fills his mind with images, ideas, concepts of the objects of thought
and of the relations which exist between these objects, and thereby
acquires the materials for the comparisons which constitute the essence
of good thinking. If the strength of a student is exhausted in gathering
and storing the materials for thought, his mind becomes a wilderness of
facts; if he reasons without the facts, his conclusions are more unreal
than the figments of the imagination.
[Sidenote: Truth the proper thought-material.]
Truth is the best thought-material for the mind to act upon. The
possession of truth is the aim and the goal of all correct thinking.
Knowledge of the truth implies the conformity of thinking with being. The
world within should be made to correspond with the world outside of us.
[Sidenote: The laboratory and the library.]
[Sidenote: Aristotle.]
Fortunately, the self-activity of children is towards the objective world
of things which they can see, hear, smell, taste, and handle. From inner
impulse their thinking is directed towards the cognition of objects.
One of the functions of nature study is to beget habits of careful and
accurate observation. This is a characteristic feature of the laboratory
method as distinguished from the library method. A training in both is
essential to a complete education. The library stores the treasures of
knowledge which the human race has gathered and makes them accessible to
the learner. The laboratory shows him by what methods truth is discovered
and tested and verified. The German professor who declined to visit a
menagerie, asserting that he could evolve the idea of the elephant from
his inner consciousness, may have spent much time in reading books and
in speculation; but he certainly never worked in a laboratory; nor had
he taken to heart the lessons which he might have learned from the sages
of antiquity. Aristotle knew the importance of asking nature for facts,
and he induced his royal pupil, Alexander the Great, to employ two
thousand persons in Europe, Asia, and Africa for the purpose of gathering
information concerning beasts, birds, and reptiles, whereby he was
enabled to write fifty volumes upon animated nature. After teachers had
forgotten his methods they still turned to his books for the treasures
which he had gathered. In the ages in which men hardly dared to ask
nature for her secrets, fearing that they might be accused of witchcraft,
they turned to Aristotle as if he were an infallible guide—so much so
that when Galileo announced the discovery of sun-spots a monk declared
that he had read Aristotle through from beginning to end, and inasmuch
as Aristotle said nothing about spots on the sun, therefore there are
none. This book-method of studying science has not entirely disappeared
from the seats of learning. Books like Tyndall’s “Water and the Forms
of Water,” Faraday’s “Chemistry of a Candle,” and Newcomb’s “Popular
Astronomy” may, indeed, be read or studied as literature, and thus prove
a means of culture; but to accept the facts and statements of a text-book
without verification is the lazy man’s method of studying science; and as
a method it fails to lay the foundation upon which a solid superstructure
can be built. The correct method starts with observation of the things
to be known, develops the basal concepts which lie at the foundation of
the science under consideration, ends by teaching the pupil how to make
independent investigations, how to utilize the treasures which have been
preserved in our libraries, thereby furnishing an adequate supply of
proper materials for thought.
[Sidenote: Productive minds.]
The habits of men who have surprised the world by their intellectual and
professional achievements are very suggestive. Spurgeon kept his mind
filled by constant reading. Goethe was fond of travel and utilized what
he learned from others. Emerson visited the markets regularly, conversed
with the men and women from whom he bought, and sought to learn their
views on current events. Study the greatest thinkers the world has
known, and you will find their memories to have been a storehouse of
thought-materials which they analyzed, sifted, compared, and formulated
into systems that win the admiration of all who love to think.
IV
BASAL CONCEPTS AS THOUGHT-MATERIAL
Thought proper, as distinguished from other facts of
consciousness, may be adequately described as the act of
knowing or judging of things by means of concepts.
MANSEL.
We cannot learn all words through other words. There is a
large and rapidly increasing part of all modern vocabularies
which can be comprehended only by the observation of nature,
scientific experiment,—in short, by the study of things.
MARSH.
The question we ask of each thing (and of the whole experience)
is, What _are_ you? You have qualities which I find everywhere
else; your color I find in other things; your texture and
hardness and odor and form I find in other things; but they
are combined in you in such a way as to make you a thing by
yourself, and not anything else. And I want to know what you
truly _are_,—in short, what is your essence, which is also your
idea, and the purpose or τέλος of your existence.
LAURIE.
IV
BASAL CONCEPTS AS THOUGHT-MATERIAL
[Sidenote: Building concepts.]
The head may be likened unto a walled city, with comparatively few
building materials on the inside, and with a limited number of gate-ways
through which all other materials for building purposes must pass.
The walls are not made of brick or stone, but of bone; the gate-ways
are the different senses through which knowledge enters the mind. The
building materials on the inside are intuitive ideas which take shape in
conjunction with the entrance of materials from without. The structures
which are built up out of the ideas within and the sense-impressions
from without are individual and general concepts. Take an orange. Its
shape, color, parts, are known through the eye. Its flavor, as sweet
or sour, is ascertained through taste; its odor through smell; its
temperature, shape, and some other qualities through touch. These
various sense-impressions, giving the mind a knowledge of essential
and accidental qualities and attributes, are combined in the idea of
a particular orange. If the object were a bell, its sound, parts,
uses, and qualities would make impressions through different gate-ways
of knowledge; the builder inside would combine them into the more or
less complete idea of the object presented to the senses. From each
sense-impression the mind may get a percept; the synthesis of these
percepts produces the individual concept or notion.
It is helpful at this point clearly to distinguish between essential
and accidental attributes. The orange may have been kept in the open
air when the temperature is low. To the hand it feels cold, and this
quality enters into the idea of the first orange which the child has. As
other oranges which have been in a warmer atmosphere are brought to the
child, the attribute cold is seen to be accidental,—that is, it is not a
necessary quality of oranges in general. On the other hand, the qualities
which are found in every orange—many of them hard to describe in
words—become fixed in the mind as essential attributes of the orange. In
course of time many objects of the same kind are presented to the senses,
cognized by comparison so as to retain the essential attributes and to
omit the accidentals. By this process the general notion or concept is
formed.
[Sidenote: Gate-ways of knowledge.]
It is self-evident that the mind’s comparisons and conclusions are
unreliable in so far as the gate-ways of knowledge are defective. Few
persons have perfect ears; many can never become expert tuners of pianos
or reliable critics of musical performances. The man who is color-blind
is not accepted in the railway service or as an officer in the navy. The
man who is totally blind is never selected as a guide in daylight. On the
other hand, the blind girl spoken of by Bulwer could find her way better
in the darkness of the last days of Pompeii than other people, because
she was accustomed to rely upon the data furnished by the other senses in
making her way through the city, and had improved these as gate-ways of
knowledge beyond the needs of those gifted with sight.
[Sidenote: From things to symbols.]
[Sidenote: From sign to thing or idea.]
[Sidenote: The sense to be addressed.]
In building concepts of objects in nature it would be a great mistake to
begin with the word instead of the thing. Just as little as a blind man
can conceive the qualities color, light, darkness, through mere words,
so little can children conceive classes of objects which have never
addressed the senses. Hence great stress has been laid by educational
reformers upon the cultivation of habits of observation, upon the supreme
necessity of teaching by the use of objects, or so-called object-lessons.
First, things, then words, or signs for things, was at one time a
favorite maxim in treatises on teaching. Consistent application of
the maxim would have banished the dictionary from the school-room, or
at least its use as a means for ascertaining the meaning of words. In
consulting the dictionary for the meaning of a word, we pass not from the
thing to its sign, but in the opposite direction,—that is, from the sign
to the thing signified, from the symbol to the idea for which the symbol
stands. The main essential in good instruction is that the words be made
significant. In primary instruction this is best accomplished by passing
from the idea to the word; but in advanced instruction it is of less
importance whether we pass from the word to the idea or from the idea to
the word. The meaning of very many words is acquired from the connection
in which they are used. For the meaning of the larger number of words
in our vocabulary we never consult a dictionary. The finer shades of
meaning we get not from definitions, but from quotations taken from
standard authors. This fact should never tempt the teacher to trust to
words, definitions, and descriptions in the formation of basal concepts.
He should seek to give unto himself a clear and full account of the
things or ideas which cannot spring from mere words, however skilfully
arranged in sentences. The music-teacher who complained of the public
schools because a seven-year-old child did not grasp his meaning when
he spoke of half-notes, quarter-notes, eighth-notes, sixteenth-notes,
should have known that many children of that age have never been taught
fractions, and that the idea of a fraction is obtained not from sounds
(who distinguishes between half a noise and a whole noise?), but from
objects which address the eye. Instead of complaining about the school
which the pupil attended, a teacher acquainted with the mysteries of his
art would have started with the comparison of things visible; and after
having developed the idea of halves, quarters, eighths, sixteenths, by
the division of visible objects into equal parts, he would have applied
the idea to musical sounds.
[Sidenote: Different gate-ways for different ideas.]
[Sidenote: Integers.]
In seeking to build in the mind of the learner the concepts which lie
at the basis of a new branch of study, it is a legitimate question to
ask by which of the gate-ways of knowledge the materials or elements
for the new idea can best be made to enter the mind. At the basis of
arithmetic lies the idea of number,—an idea that is evoked by the
question of how many applied to a collection of two or more units. Taste
and smell must be ruled out from the list of senses which can be utilized
to advantage. Three taps on the desk are as easily recognized as three
marks or strokes on the black-board. The sense of touch is helpful in
passing from concrete to abstract numbers. To think a number when the
corresponding collection of objects is not visible, but is suggested by
tactile impressions, helps to emancipate the thinking process from the
domination of the eye; in other words, it helps to sunder the thinking of
number from a specific sense, and thus aids in the evolution of the idea
of number apart from concrete objects.
[Sidenote: Fractions.]
As already indicated, there are some basal concepts, like that of a
fraction, in the development of which only one sense can be utilized to
advantage. Whilst imparting the idea of a whole number, the appeal may
be to the eye, the ear, and the sense of touch; the instruction designed
to impart the idea of fractions to the normal child is limited to visible
objects. In the instruction of the blind the other senses are addressed
from necessity. The extent to which touch can supply the function of
sight is full of hints to teachers in charge of pupils possessing all the
gate-ways of knowledge.
[Sidenote: Teaching decimals.]