exercises in oral reading. As in other things, so in school matters,
distance lends enchantment to the view. Legouvé, in his lectures on the
“Art of Reading,” mentions with approval that in the great Republic of
North America reading aloud is justly considered one of the very first
elements of a child’s education, whilst in France, reading aloud does not
reach even the sorry dignity of a diverting art, but is regarded as a
curiosity, a luxury, often something hardly better than a pretension.[43]
This was written several decades ago, and may not be just to the French
nation at this time. The value of oral reading depends upon the way
in which it is done. If it amounts to no more than calling words and
parrot-like imitation of the teacher’s manner of reading, the exercise is
a waste of time. The mastery of the new words and of the thought embodied
should precede the attempt to read a lesson aloud. The mastery of the
words involves ability to recognize them at sight, to pronounce them with
fluency and ease, and to spell them by letter and by sound. It implies
both a knowledge of their meaning and ability to use them in a sentence.
An average series of readers has a vocabulary of five thousand words. The
meaning of all these words may be known at sight, but ability to use them
by tongue or pen is quite another thing, the vocabulary of most persons
being not much in excess of a thousand words. The thought can be mastered
by an exercise in silent reading, followed by the oral and written
reproduction of the lesson. The mastery of the thought is a condition of
proper vocal utterance.
[Sidenote: Acting and reading.]
[Sidenote: Reading and talking.]
There is a difference between acting and reading. The actor endeavors
to speak and act after the exact manner of the character whom he
impersonates. The reader aims to suggest the thought instead of imitating
the original actors. An actor will go through the motion of stabbing
or shooting an enemy; the reader simply aims to suggest the thought of
what was done. Exercises in breathing, gesture, tone, pitch, cadence,
voice may be needed for the sake of correcting defects; nevertheless,
everything connected with oral reading should turn on and culminate in
the stream of thought. If anything else is made the object of chief
regard, the main purpose of oral reading is lost. It furnishes an
excellent test by means of which the teacher can determine whether the
pupil understands what he reads or is merely calling words after the
manner of a parrot. To correct the unnatural tones acquired in the
school-room, the pupil is wisely exhorted to read as he would talk. In
the effort to develop a style of reading exactly like talking, some
teachers ruin their natural way of talking and reading. In conversation,
they talk as if they were trying to read. While reading, they seem to be
trying to talk. The human voice is so made that it puts the quotation
marks to selections recited from memory and to sentences read from a
manuscript or book. As a rule, a person can read best what he himself
has written; yet his voice tells whether his sentences and thoughts are
framed and evolved at the moment of delivery, or taken from a manuscript
prepared beforehand. As a matter of fact, no one can read as he talks or
speaks. A blindfolded listener could tell when Spurgeon was reading or
speaking. The same was true of Charles Sumner, and of every other great
speaker America has produced.
[Sidenote: Abiding thoughts.]
To think the best thoughts of the best men is the privilege of him who
can read. To plant these thoughts in other minds by reading aloud is a
noble achievement. To give in speech something from our own resources
that others shall treasure is nobler still, because it links our life
with the creative workers of the world. But noblest of all is it to
write what shall be read by our own and future generations, in our own
and other lands, as a source of light and life, of uplift and enjoyment.
The worst punishment that can befall a human being is to be cut off from
participation in the movement of the race towards greater well-being
and perfection. One naturally desires to employ his gifts and powers
for the benefit of mankind. The stream of thought determines what we
shall accomplish. If others are to be benefited by our thinking, they
must think our thoughts. The stream of our thought must carry ideas of
interest and value to them, ideas they will care to get and keep. If
our thinking is busy with things of transient interest, transient will
be our influence over others. If our thought is to abide, it must deal
with verities of eternal moment to humanity, with the works of Him who
made the heavens and the earth, with the truth of Him who is “the same
yesterday, to-day, and forever.”
XVI
KINDS OF THINKING
“What we want is not the example of Democritus, who put out
his eyes that, ceasing to read, he might think the more; or
the example of Pythagoras, who devoted his evenings to solemn
reflections on the events of the day. We want men and women of
all-round activities who will set apart an hour for thought’s
own sake, and thus fulfil the exhortation of a wise man whose
practice it was to ‘sort his thoughts and label them.’”
T. S. KNOWLSON.
“People read a great deal more than they used to do,—there
is more to be read,—but they think less. The chief danger of
to-day is that of intellectual apathy. Life is so complex, the
struggle for existence is so keen, and pleasures of various
kinds so cheap and abundant, that men and women seem to live
entirely on the surface of things. What we need is a call to
independent thought.”
IBID.
XVI
KINDS OF THINKING
[Sidenote: Equivocal terms.]
[Sidenote: The term _thinking_.]
[Sidenote: Kinds of thinking.]
As was pointed out in the first chapter, the word _thinking_ has several
meanings. One can hardly write or speak on education without using the
word in more senses than one, and it is not always convenient to break
the line of thought or discussion by indicating with a definition the
meaning intended. This is a violation of Pascal’s rule, that no terms
in the least obscure or equivocal shall be used without defining them.
Pascal possessed one of the most remarkable intellects the world has ever
known. His style has been described as a garment of light. Few thinkers
have attained, to an equal degree, clearness of expression and perfect
grasp of the truth. Nowhere are these qualities more essential than in
lectures and treatises on teaching. It is a misfortune that so useful
a word as _thinking_ should ever be ambiguous. The use of equivocal
terms leads to misunderstandings in theory and faults in practice. The
advantage of technical terms lies in the fact that after they have
been clearly defined they can always be used in the same sense. The
disadvantage in the use of technical terms is that they convey no meaning
to minds unfamiliar with the terminology of the specific science to
which they belong. Hence the best thinkers cannot escape the necessity
of employing words in current use to convey their thoughts. As soon as
words pass into common parlance they acquire a variety of meanings and
of shades of meaning. The thought of a people is always more or less
in advance of their vocabulary; the same word must be used in several
meanings, because no other term equally simple and convenient can serve
as a substitute. No one, for instance, can write or speak in the English
language without using the word _is_ in both its figurative and its
literal sense. The connection must show what signification is intended.
The same remark applies to the word _thinking_. The connection must show
whether it is used in the colloquial sense of guessing, or in the logical
sense of a comparison of two ideas through their relation to a third,
or in the broader sense of imaging, reflecting, and reacting upon what
one reads or hears, or in a still broader sense, to designate any form
of mental activity. Since the popular mind employs the word as a general
term to cover the entire intellectual life, it is convenient to specify
kinds of thinking by the use of adjectives like independent, loose,
continuous, organic, technical, scientific, and other qualifying phrases.
Inasmuch as these distinctions are made for the purpose of characterizing
differences observed in the thought-processes of the maturer life for
which our pupils are to be trained, it is helpful to glance at them for
the purpose of seeing the bearing of what we do at school upon habits of
thought beyond the school.
[Sidenote: The independent thinker.]
What is meant by an independent thinker? Evidently one who is not
indebted to others for the inferences which he draws or the conclusions
at which he arrives. Many practices at school are subversive of habits
of independent thinking. The assignment of lessons of such length
and difficulty that the weaker pupils must rely upon their stronger
classmates for help, or resort to “coaches, keys, and ponies” for
assistance, makes them helpless instead of self-reliant, and cultivates
the memory at the expense of the understanding. The lessons should be
graded so as to beget the sense of mastery. Every difficulty that is
overcome by a pupil’s own efforts tends to develop in him an ambition to
conquer other difficulties. Few, if any, joys can be compared with the
ecstatic joy of victory. Moreover, it should be the aim of the teacher
to beget in the pupil a love of truth more potent and profound than
reverence for a favorite authority. On the contrary, the feeling of
independence and the desire of distinction by differing from other people
may grow into a passion. This seldom does much harm in the case of an
editor or a professor. If you give either of them leave to criticise and
to print, he is well satisfied. If he is elected to a board of managers
or the national assembly, his critical faculty and his fondness for
finding fault and thinking differently from other people may make him
a hinderance to the leaders, who must get things done, or cause him to
stand apart, like Ewald, in the German Reichstag, as a one-man party,
whose views must be ignored on all questions requiring prompt action or
immediate decision. To counteract this tendency in a youth of strong
personality, it is difficult to devise anything better than the moulding
supremacy of class-spirit, the chastening influence of a contest in the
literary society, and the relentless lessons which a boy gets on the
play-ground when he will not play because the game does not go his way.
Independence of thought in the quest of truth, on the one hand, and
concert of action for the public good, on the other, are two of the most
useful lessons to be learned at school. At this point there is room for a
kind of child-study apart from a syllabus of set questions, and leading
to results which cannot be tabulated in statistics or averages. The
average in such cases is untrue as a guide, and may be utterly subversive
of correct habits of thinking, or the correct method of dealing with the
individual. To give enough optional or specific work for the brightest,
and not too much general or required work for the slowest, is an ideal
hard to realize in the assignment of work, and yet of supreme importance
in the endeavor to develop habits of independent thinking.
[Sidenote: Independent thinking and popular government.]
There is great need for independent thinking under a system of popular
government, especially on the part of those who exercise the elective
franchise. In the modern caucus or convention one man often does the
thinking for the rest. “If he is the man whom I follow, I call him my
leader. If he is the man whom you follow, I call him your boss.” When the
leader or boss is not sufficiently sure of his ability to bind the others
by his orders, those who have a following are invited to a conference, at
which a line of action is agreed upon to relieve the multitudes of the
trouble of thinking. A delegate who was giving very vociferous vent to
his feelings was rebuked by a colleague, saying, “Just think where you
are.” He replied with more emphasis than elegance, “I was not brought
here to think, but to shout.” Independent thinking is as hard work as
the average man cares to do. He craves a guide, an authority to relieve
him of the trouble of thinking for himself. Outside of their particular
vocation or profession it is absolutely necessary at times for the
strongest intellects to accept the conclusions of other thinkers. The man
who has been successful at making money, and who finds that his thinking
in financial matters is trustworthy, often makes himself obnoxious by
assuming that his opinions and conclusions should be accorded equal
weight in every other sphere of human activity. There is no better
place to teach the individual his limitations without destroying his
independence as a thinker than the atmosphere of a great university.
The dependent thinker is aptly described by a writer in _Leisure Hours_
in the following language:
[Sidenote: The dependent thinker.]
“It is sometimes amusing to hear a man of this order coming out strongly
with opinions which he would have you believe are thoroughly independent
and original, but which you can trace directly to the source from which
he got them. You could indicate those sources if it were not uncivil to
do so, very much as a shrewd but not very well-behaved old gentleman
is said to have indicated at church, in a tone sufficiently loud to be
heard by the clergyman and the congregation, too,—which was especially
galling,—the authors to whom the said clergyman had been indebted for
his sermon, ‘That’s Sherlock; that’s Tillotson; that’s Jeremy Taylor.’
‘I tell you what, fellow, if you don’t hold your tongue, I’ll have you
turned out of church.’ ‘That’s his own.’”
The men who must depend upon others to do their thinking for them deserve
pity and commiseration. The bureaus which thrive by furnishing essays
and orations for commencements, sermons for special occasions, and even
for the regularly recurring Sunday services, show how often our schools
make their pupils dependent instead of self-reliant. On being cast upon
the sea of life, their minds resemble a craft which has lost its rudder;
they drift with wind and tide, uncertain where they shall land. Their
thinking is not grounded on first principles; hence their minds reflect
transient views on every question. The strong personality in the sunlight
of whose influence they happened last to bask moulds their opinions
and directs their intellectual life until they move into the sphere of
new influences, constantly resembling those whom Randolph of Roanoke
stigmatized as dough-faces because their votes were under the control of
party leaders and were cast regardless of their convictions of right.
[Sidenote: Continuous thought.]
The men whom the world reveres as great thinkers have been distinguished
by their ability to give continuous thought to whatever engaged their
serious attention. Newton claimed that he made his discoveries by always
thinking about them. His biographers relate how he would for hours remain
seated upon his bed, half dressed, absorbed in thought, forgetful of his
surroundings. Stories of the absent-mindedness of Socrates, Sydney Smith,
Neander, Edison, and many others who attained eminence as philosophers,
authors, or inventors, are interesting indeed, but they throw no light
upon the way in which these men acquired their marvellous powers; they
merely show a capacity for focussing all the energies of the soul upon
one point to the exclusion of sense impressions from without. It is
very certain that men who excel in any line of work acquire habits of
concentrated and continuous thought in one direction. Very different from
these are the mental habits of the boy and the average man. A writer in
_Cornhill Magazine_ describes their intellectual activity as follows:
“The normal mental locomotion of even well-educated men and women (save
under the spur of exceptional stimulus) is neither the flight of an
eagle in the sky, nor the trot of a horse upon the road, but may better
be compared to the lounge of a truant school-boy in a shady lane, now
dawdling passively, now taking a hop-skip-jump, now stopping to pick
blackberries, and now turning to right or left to catch a butterfly,
climb a tree, or make dick-duck-drake on a pond; going nowhere in
particular, and only once in a mile or so proceeding six steps in an
orderly and philosophical manner.”
[Sidenote: Loose thinkers.]
[Sidenote: Organic thinking.]
The thoughts of some men resemble mosaic work. Each part is beautiful in
itself, but has no inner connection with those next to it. Men of this
class are called loose thinkers; it is always difficult to retain what
they say. The thinking of a totally opposite class of men resembles the
growth of an organism. They start from a germinal idea, which, like seed
sown into good soil, begins to grow, throwing out parts which have inward
connection and which together constitute an organic unity. In a machine
any part can be replaced by another. In the organism no such substitution
is possible. For each organ bears a life relation to the whole, and if
it is wanting the unity of the organism is destroyed. Organic thinking
gives the hearer the feeling that the several parts and inferences of
a discourse are evolved from his inner consciousness. Having had the
germ-idea in his mind, he feels as if he had held all it involves; the
speaker supplied the conditions of development as the sun supplies warmth
for vegetable growth. The effect of such thinking is irresistible. The
branches of study which thus grow out of a fundamental idea, and show
the inner relation between the subjects not as a mere sequence, but as
a living organic relation, have an educative value which cannot be too
highly prized. The organic thinker, if he makes himself understood, has
the audience on his side; and his cogency can seldom be refuted except by
showing either that his germinal idea is wrong or that his conclusions
have no connection with his premises.
[Sidenote: Harris on stages of thinking.]
Dr. Harris has drawn attention to three stages of thinking. He claims
that in the first stage things are regarded as the essential elements
of all being, that in the second the mind discovers relations,—truly
essential relations,—and that in the third stage the mind thinks the
self-related. “Self-relation is the category of the reason, just as
relativity is the category of the understanding, or non-relativity
(atomism) the category of sense-perception.” Theoretically this
distinction is important as giving us a rational basis for the knowledge
of God as revealed to man. Practically, every child thinks the idea of
God. Where the study of science or philosophy leads to atheism, the wish
is always father to the thought.
[Sidenote: Technical and scientific thinking.]
Clifford has made a distinction between technical and scientific
thinking. The former enables one to do with skill and accuracy what has
been done heretofore. The latter partakes of the nature of prophecy or
prediction. He claims that scientific as well as merely technical thought
make use of experience to direct human action, but that while technical
thought or skill enables a man to deal with the same circumstances he has
met before, scientific thought enables him to deal with circumstances
different from any he has met before. In his opinion, scientific thought
is human progress itself. An example or two can best be given in his own
language.
“If you make a dot on a piece of paper, and then hold a piece of Iceland
spar over it, you will see not one dot, but two. A mineralogist,
by measuring the angles of a crystal, can tell you whether or not
it possesses this property without looking through it. He requires
no scientific thought to do that. But Sir Rowan Hamilton, the late
Astronomer Royal of Ireland, knowing these facts, and also the
explanation of them which Fresnel had given, thought about the subject,
and predicted that by looking through certain crystals in a particular
direction we should see not two dots, but a continuous circle. Mr.
Lloyd made the experiment and saw the circle, a result which had never
been even suspected. This has always been considered one of the most
signal instances of scientific thought in the domain of physics. It
is most distinctly an application of experience gained under certain
circumstances to entirely different circumstances.”[44]
Clifford compares two well-known achievements in the domain of astronomy
which help to set the distinction between technical and scientific
thought in a still clearer light:
“Ancient astronomers observed that the relative motions of the sun and
moon recurred all over again in the same order every nineteen years. They
were thus enabled to predict the time at which eclipses would take place.
A calculator at one of our great observatories can do a great deal more
than this. Like them, he makes use of past experience to predict the
future; but he knows of a great number of other cycles besides the one of
nineteen years, and takes account of all of them; and he can tell about
the solar eclipse of six years hence, exactly when it will be visible,
and how much of the sun’s surface will be covered at each place, and to
a second at what time of the day it will begin and finish there. This
prediction involves technical skill of the highest order, but it does
not involve scientific thought, as any astronomer will tell you. By such
calculations the place of the planet Uranus at different times of the
year had been predicted and set down. The predictions were not fulfilled.
Then arose Adams, and from the errors in the prediction he calculated
the place of an entirely new planet that had never yet been suspected;
and you all know how the new planet was actually found in that place.
Now this prediction does involve scientific thought, as any one who has
studied it will tell you. Here, then, are two cases of thought about the
same subject, both predicting events by the application of previous
experience, yet we say one is technical and the other scientific.”[45]
[Sidenote: Science as knowledge of things in their causes and relations.]
The foregoing distinction may be valuable in the training of university
students whose career is to be that of original research and discovery,
but it has very little value for teachers in schools of lower grade. For
ordinary purposes, science is the knowledge of things in their causes and
relations. If the teacher begets the habit of asking why, and makes the
pupils dissatisfied with simply knowing the how and the what, he has gone
far towards making them thinkers in the scientific sense of the word.
How shall the knowledge of things in their causes and relations be
attained? The mind first thinks things as isolated units apart from and
without reference to other things. Under the impulse to know it resolves
the thing into its elements or constituent parts, and then puts them
together in a more complete idea of each thing as a whole. The boy whose
curiosity impels him to take apart a watch or clock is following the bent
of the mind to proceed analytically. If he does not try to put the pieces
together, so that the reconstructed whole will keep time as before, he
needs stimulus in the direction of synthetic thinking. Soon his interest
in time-pieces leads him to detect similarities between American watches
and those made in Switzerland, and he learns to classify time-pieces,
to see a multitude of details and peculiarities at a glance, one
characteristic or peculiarity bringing to his mind the distinctive parts
and construction of every watch in a given class. From the way in which
a given watch keeps time, he draws inferences in regard to the entire
class. This is inductive thinking. From the conclusions he has framed, he
makes up his mind as to the new watch which the jeweller offers him for
sale. He is now thinking deductively.
[Sidenote: Distinction between laws and causes.]