as the activities of memory and imagination. In the first or lowest stage
the aim is some form of happiness. In the second stage the will acts
under the influence of some ethical idea, commonly finding expression
in a maxim like the command, Thou shalt not steal, or in some fixed
occupation like a trade or farm work. In the third the will acts under
the inspiration of the good or its opposite, and from motives grounded
in right or wrong. In all these stages of growth thinking is a most
important factor. Let us go into details for purposes of illustration.
The human will in its process of development starts on a physical rather
than a spiritual basis. On the one hand a want is felt and on the other
an impulse towards the satisfaction of that want. In course of time this
impulse or appetence assumes the form of intelligent or conscious purpose
looking towards the gratification of felt wants, and then the will begins
to show itself in the form of clear, definite volitions and actions. The
strength of the will depends largely upon these impulses or appetences;
and their strength in turn depends upon the health, the temperament, the
organization (physical and psychical) of the individual. If by careful
diet, exercise, or otherwise, we invigorate these, we thereby furnish
capital that will in after years bear compound interest in the form of
strong will-power. If the diet, exercise, play, sleep, and work are not
properly regulated, first by the parent, the nurse, and the teacher, and
later by the individual himself, the appetences develop into appetites
that enslave the will and seriously interfere with its further growth. As
the power to think is developed, the will passes over into a higher stage
of activity. The very longing for happiness leads the child to impose
restrictions upon itself. It feels happy if it can secure the approbation
of those with whom it associates. If we show our displeasure at something
it has done, the little philosopher begins to practise self-denial in
certain directions for the purpose of regaining and retaining our good
will. The second stage is now reached in which self-gratification gives
place to self-denial, the will acting under the influence of one or more
ethical ideas. The child at school is lifted upon this loftier plane
by the circumstances which surround him; it must practise the school
virtues,—punctuality, industry, obedience, and the like; it accepts
certain forms of self-restraint in keeping quiet, in abstaining from
play, in observing the rules of the school. Where the discipline is rigid
and the instruction lacks interest, it may even conceive of the school as
a mere place of self-denial and self-restraint. “Why do you come here?”
asked a director. The little boy replied, “We come here to sit and wait
for school to let out.” The hours at school can be sweetened by exercises
in thinking and expressing thought to such an extent that the school
becomes the place to which children best like to go. Some full-grown men
have not advanced very far beyond this second stage in the growth of
the will. They follow some regular occupation as the boy does in going
to school; they practise certain forms of virtue,—say honesty, so that
you could intrust to them your pocket-book with perfect safety,—but
they break the Sabbath, use God’s name in vain, and commit daily many
other sins and transgressions. Occasionally one finds a school in which
no pupil would dare to be caught telling a lie, and yet the moral tone
is low, there being vices which, like a cankerworm, eat out the moral
life of the school. The teacher should not feel satisfied until he has
raised the pupil to the third stage, where the will is brought under the
inspiration of the good, and right becomes the law of life.
Upon this highest plane different phases of development can be detected.
The law of right may brandish the avenging rod of conscience and drive
the individual into paths of rectitude. The idea of duty thus operating
alone may reduce him to the subservience of a slave and prevent him from
reaching the high stature of perfect human freedom. This kind of slavery
is apt to be followed by a struggle in which the lower nature seeks to
assert itself against the higher, and if the latter conquers, the person
is apt to be elated with the feeling of victory. Whenever you hear a man
boast of the sacrifices he has made in his devotion to duty, you can
rest assured he has not yet reached that lofty elevation in will-culture
upon which the person does right spontaneously and without effort, and
never dreams of having made a sacrifice in the performance of the hardest
duties.
[Sidenote: Evil.]
Of course, the development from the first stage may move in the opposite
direction. If the appetences are gratified beyond the requirements of
self-preservation, or of the well-being of the child, they grow into
uncontrollable desires and passions; the individual sinks deeper and
deeper into selfishness. He may deny himself for the sake of some
ambition, or vice, or wicked end which the soul cherishes; then, unless
lifted up by the grace of God, he will ultimately land in a state
bordering on that of Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, a character who
found pleasure in human suffering, and whose will was constantly under
the direction and inspiration of the principle of evil. He will at last
become like Milton’s Satan, who exclaimed, “Evil, be thou my good.”
College boys who delight in hazing innocent freshmen have gone far
towards this loathsome stage of moral degradation, the lowest which the
will can reach in its downward career.
[Sidenote: Thought and volition.]
Now, it is easy to see the relation of thinking to these several stages
of will-development. Volition presupposes something to be done, an end
to be sought and accomplished. If the will is to act steadily in the
endeavor to realize this end, the end must be clearly thought and held
before the soul in definite form. To do the right implies that the right
be known as the result of right thinking. A soul ignorant of right cannot
be expected to practise the virtues which are grounded in the law of
right. On the other hand, many forms of evil are never conceived by young
people unless suggested to them by their superiors.
Volition issues in doing, and doing is a powerful stimulus to thinking.
Making things out of wood, metal, marble, wax, papier-maché, or even
out of paper is genuine thinking in things. It is a species of doing
which flows from thinking through willing and reacts upon the process
of thinking. To see how a thing is made is better than to be told
how, but to make it by our own effort, skill, and thought is vastly
more educative than seeing and hearing. Manual training tends to make
the pupil intellectually honest. He cannot get away from a thought
expressed in wood or other material as he can from a thought expressed
in language which may suffice to suggest his idea, but not to give it
adequate expression. This influence of doing upon thinking has led to
the formulation of the maxim, We learn to do by doing,—a maxim whose
limitations and legitimate meaning it will be necessary to discuss in a
separate lecture.
XX
THINKING AND DOING
When we turn to modern pedagogics, we see how enormously the
field of reactive conduct has been extended by the introduction
of all those methods of concrete object-teaching which are the
glory of our contemporary schools. Verbal reactions, useful as
they are, are insufficient. The pupil’s words may be right, but
the concepts corresponding to them are often direfully wrong.
In a modern school, therefore, they form only a small part of
what the pupil is required to do. He must keep note-books,
make drawings, plans, and maps, take measurements, enter the
laboratory and perform experiments, consult authorities, and
write essays. He must do, in his fashion, what is often laughed
at by outsiders when it appears in prospectuses under the
title of original work; but what is really the only possible
training for the doing of original work thereafter. The most
colossal improvement which recent years have seen in secondary
education lies in the introduction of manual-training schools;
not because they will give us a people more handy and practical
for domestic life, and better skill in trades, but because they
will give us citizens with an entirely different intellectual
life. Laboratory work and shop work engender a habit of
observation, a knowledge of the difference between accuracy and
vagueness, and an insight into nature’s complexity and into the
inadequacy of all abstract verbal accounts of real phenomena,
which once brought into the mind remain there as life-long
possessions. They confer precision; because, if you are _doing_
a thing, you must do it definitely right or definitely wrong.
They give honesty; for, when you express yourself by making
things, and not by using words, it becomes impossible to
dissimulate your vagueness or ignorance by ambiguity. They
beget a habit of self-reliance; they keep the interest and
attention always cheerfully engaged, and reduce the teacher’s
disciplinary function to a minimum.
WILLIAM JAMES.
XX
THINKING AND DOING
[Sidenote: Saying and doing.]
The best methods of instruction in the ordinary school aim at the
expression of thought in language. If a thing has been well said, the
teacher and the examiner are apt to make no further inquiries. Although
the expression of thought in written or spoken language is a species
of doing, there is often a wide chasm between getting a thing said and
having it done. Many of the reforms and revolutions thought out by
university professors never get beyond the room in which they lecture or
the page on which they formulate their ideas. The freedom of speech in
the universities never troubles a despotic government until the ideas
of the professors and students show signs of passing into the life of
the nation. The difference between speech and action, between the man
of words and the man of deeds, has long been felt and emphasized. The
favorite method of teaching by lectures, and requiring the pupil to
take notes, fails utterly if it stops with mere telling how a thing
is to be done, and is not followed by actual doing on the part of the
learner. Work in the shop, in the field, and in the factory often proves
more effective in fitting a boy to earn a living than the theoretical
instruction of the schools. The advantage of doing over telling as a
means of learning has led to the formulation of the maxim, “We learn to
do by doing,” and some educational reformers have announced the maxim as
a principle of education universal in its application. Hence it is worth
while to clarify its meaning and to ascertain its limitations. In so
doing, we shall get a glimpse of the true relation between thinking and
doing.
[Sidenote: The maxim applied to medicine and surgery.]
A young man possessed of unbounded faith in this maxim came to town for
the purpose of practising medicine and surgery. He announced that if
any persons got sick he proposed to give them medicine in the hope of
learning the physiological and therapeutic effects of the various drugs.
If any limbs were to be amputated, he was willing to try his hand, in the
hope of ultimately learning how to perform surgical operations. He was
too simple to succeed as a quack. He did not get a single patient; the
people wisely gave him no opportunity of learning to do by doing.
[Sidenote: The maxim in the other professions.]
Equally foolish were it thus to apply the maxim to any of the other
professions. Would you, with life or property at stake, allow a novice
to plead your cause at court in order that he might learn to plead by
pleading? Who would waste the golden Sabbath hours in listening to one
who was trying to learn to preach by preaching? The civilized world
regards knowledge, which is the product of the act of learning, as the
indispensable guide of those who offer their services at the bar, from
the pulpit, or in the sick-room. When a Yale professor was asked whether
study was required of those divinely called to preach, he replied that
he had read of but one instance in which the Lord condescended to speak
through the mouth of an ass.
[Sidenote: Comenius.]
Even an ass may learn to do some things by continually doing them in a
blind way, and that, too, in spite of his proverbial stubbornness; but
such learning by blind practice is unworthy of the school-life of a being
gifted with human intelligence, and capable, it may be, of filling a
profession. Instinct may guide a bee or a beaver: but knowledge should
guide man in the arts and habits which he acquires. This fact is not
ignored in the maxim as originally given by Comenius. “Things to be
done should be learned by doing them. Mechanics understand this well:
they do not give the apprentice a lecture upon their trade, but they
will let him see how they, as masters, do; then they place the tool in
his hands, teach him to use it and imitate them. Doing can be learned
only by doing, writing by writing, painting by painting, and so on.”
There is in this statement a clear recognition, on the one hand, of the
knowledge-getting which precedes and accompanies all intelligent doing,
and, on the other, of the practice which is needful for the attainment
of skill. The master mechanic seeks first to give his apprentice a clear
concept of what is to be done; and the knowledge thus acquired through
the eye, and perhaps partly through hearing directions and explanations,
is afterwards put into practice by the actual manipulation of tools and
materials. If the maxim had been allowed to stand in this, its original
form and meaning, no one could have objected to its use and application.
But when the attempt was made to elevate it into a principle of binding
force for all teaching; when, furthermore, the form was shortened so as
to widen the meaning, and the maxim was then applied to regulate the
acquisition of every form of human activity, both physical and mental, it
is not surprising that protests were heard, and the necessity was felt of
investigating the maxim for the purpose of ascertaining its limitations
and defining its meaning.
[Sidenote: Value of the maxim.]
Yet we must not fail to make grateful acknowledgment of the services to
education rendered by those who lifted the maxim into prominence. How
often were pupils expected to learn one thing by doing another. Drawing
was advocated because it would improve the penmanship. Silent reading or
thought-getting was to be learned by oral reading or thought-giving. The
alphabet was taught as if the names of the letters would make the child
familiar with the sounds. The idea of number was to be gotten by naming
the numbers or imitating the Arabic notation. Facility and accuracy in
the use of language were to be acquired from exercises in parsing and
analysis. Familiarity with birds, flowers, minerals, chemicals, etc., was
to be gained from the learned phraseology of the text-books. Sometimes
even the teachers knew very little more than the technical terms. When
the great ornithologist, Wilson, visited Princeton College, the professor
of natural history scarcely knew a sparrow from a woodpecker. A great
change has come over Princeton and all other higher institutions of
learning; and the new influence has been felt in our high schools, and
even in the grades below.
[Sidenote: Maxims, principles.]
Whilst cheerfully acknowledging the value of the maxim of Comenius,
we should, nevertheless, insist on the difference between a maxim
which may regulate our conduct in specific cases and a principle
which is an all-controlling guide in operations. Coleridge says, “A
maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is
speculative; a principle has truth in itself, and is prospective.” It
is always dangerous to generalize upon facts observed in one realm of
investigation, and then to allow others to apply these general statements
to realms as diverse from the original field of observation as mind or
spirit is from matter. The disciples in such cases always manifest the
hidden weaknesses in the system of their master. They rush in where he
would have feared to tread. They push his language to extremes, from
which his deeper insight, broader vision, and larger experience would
have caused him to shrink. Comenius framed the maxim from the observation
of bodily acts; some seek to apply it to every form of human activity.
The original language has been twisted into a statement that sounds
paradoxical. “We learn to do by doing.” What can these words mean? If we
_can_ do a given thing, what need is there of learning to do that thing.
If we cannot do the thing to be learned by the doing of it, how can any
doing on our part issue in learning? Evidently the maxim in its modern
form, if it is at all valid, must partake of the nature of a paradox,
which, though seemingly absurd, is yet true in essence or fact. For
the purpose of testing the validity of a paradoxical statement, there
is no better way than to ascertain its possible meanings, to eliminate
those evidently not intended, and finally to investigate the one or more
senses or interpretations that may legitimately be put upon the language.
The investigation will, in this instance, reveal the relation existing
between doing and the act of learning.
[Sidenote: Analysis of the maxim.]
In the first place, the maxim cannot mean that we learn to do by every
kind of doing. The kind of doing by which the young man hoped to learn
medicine and surgery was ridiculed centuries ago; no one in our day would
advocate mere blind doing as a means of learning. The maxim must refer to
doing guided by an intelligent will. The doing must be guided by thinking
that is based upon correct and reliable data or premises.
Again, the maxim cannot mean that we learn one thing by doing another.
The maxim was emphasized in protest against the absurdity of some of
our methods of teaching. It may happen that the learner accidentally
discovers one thing while seeking to find out some other thing; to expect
that this shall always be the case is to invite disappointment. For
instance, pupils do not learn to spell while studying books if attention
is absorbed in the meaning, and is not drawn, in separate exercises, to
the correct orthography of words that are apt to be misspelled.
[Sidenote: Fatigue.]
There is a third limitation to the maxim on the side of attention. How,
for instance, is the art of writing acquired? It is undoubtedly true that
a boy cannot learn to write without himself writing; it is equally true
that he is not always learning or improving in penmanship while he is
practising with his pen upon paper. From the teacher or the copy he gets
a concept of the letters to be made. The first efforts at imitation are
fraught with defects. The pupil must clearly recognize wherein he failed,
and earnestly strive to remedy the defects, if the next attempt is to
be an improvement. The maxim, if here applied, must mean that the pupil
learns to do by continually doing, as nearly as he can, the thing to be
done. With each step of progress, his concept of the form of the letters
and how to make them becomes more accurate; or, in other words, his power
and skill keep pace with his knowledge. Finally, after much practice,
the nerves and muscles which control the act of writing are properly
co-ordinated; the habit of writing with ease is acquired; the process
becomes largely subconscious, if not altogether automatic. The learner
has at length reached the stage in which his attention is no longer
concentrated upon the form and beauty of the letters, but rather upon
the thought to be expressed, and it is quite possible that henceforth
his chirography will grow more illegible the more he writes. Of course,
he is now learning the art of composing by composing; but he has ceased
to learn in the direction of his handwriting by writing, because the
attention is riveted upon something else. Even before the subconscious
stage is reached, practice, if too long continued, may exhaust the powers
of attention, and doing can no longer issue in learning by reason of
fatigue.
On the score of attention there is a limit to the application of the
maxim in another direction. Talking, oral reading, and public speaking
may be spoiled by too much attention. Practice in these, under the
guidance of an injudicious teacher, may serve to make the gestures too
studied, the pronunciation too precise, and the tones of the voice too
artificial, defects by which the hearer’s mind is drawn from the thought
to the delivery.
[Sidenote: Injudicious criticism.]
The lack of good elocutionary drill in youth is a serious misfortune, yet
the writer cannot help blaming the elocutionists for ruining one public
speaker among his acquaintances. Under their tuition the gestures and
articulation of this friend have become almost faultless; but there is
such a self-conscious air about his platform utterances that the audience
can think of nothing except the delivery. By his efforts at doing he
has learned most emphatically not to do. The same thing may happen in
elementary instruction, and in the practice-schools connected with our
State normal schools. Injudicious criticism by the teacher may so rivet
the attention upon the utterance that the pupils lose sight of the
thought to be expressed, and the more they practise under his guidance
the worse their reading becomes. The vocal and physical elements, in
the act of oral reading or speaking, should spring spontaneously out of
the thought and sentiment to be conveyed. Any drill which interferes
with this natural connection between the mental and the physical is
indescribably bad, and should never be regarded as a means of learning.
Equally severe must be the sentence of condemnation upon much of the
criticism to which pupil teachers are subjected by their fellow-students
and their critic-teachers at our normal schools, and upon the comments
made by candidates for the ministry and their professors upon the efforts
of the embryo preacher during the so-called homiletical exercises.
Injudicious fault-finding leads to a kind of doing which cannot issue in
learning.
[Sidenote: Application.]
[Sidenote: The arm and hand.]
Within these limitations we find a wide field for the application of the
maxim to our efforts at learning to think and to express thought. The
hand performs a very important function in aiding the mind to perfect
its concepts. The metric system remains a dark, confused mass of names
so long as the pupil does not actually handle and use the metric units
of weights and measures. A few days of manual training, during which
the learner is compelled to measure accurately, are of immense account
in developing accurate ideas and accurate thinking. Of all the ways of
expressing thought, those by the hand and the tongue are more perfect
than those by the eye, the face, the gesture, the bodily movement. The
latter are well adapted to express feeling; the former, to express
thought. Few have ever thought of the marvellous mechanism given to a
human being in the arm and hand. A glimpse from the mathematician’s point
of view is here very interesting. A pencil fastened to the end of a ruler
revolving around a fixed point will describe a circle. If the pencil be
fastened to the end of a second ruler revolving around the end of the
first, while the first revolves around the original centre, the pencil
will describe a very complicated curve. If three radii, revolving in this
way, be joined together, the pencil at the end of the third can be made
to describe the cycles and epicycles by which the ancient astronomers
explained the movements of the planets. The modern mathematician has
shown that, by annexing a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth radius, each
revolving around the preceding, while the first is moving around the
original centre, all curves of the fifth and sixth orders can be
described. Let any one examine his right arm, starting from the shoulder
and ending with the fingers, and he will find that since infancy he has
had this mechanism for executing curves and movements, has been using
this wonderful system of revolving radii to express thought, and that
it has been to him a source of skill in thinking and doing. When viewed
in their anatomical and physiological aspects, human arms and hands are
seen to be a still more wonderful mechanism, rivalled only by the tongue
in capability for describing any curve and uttering any kind of thought.
Whilst the tongue may speak many oral languages, the hand writes them
all, and supplies additional methods for expressing thought in drawing,
painting, sculpture, instrumental music, in the various handicrafts, and
in the machines which act like man’s hand made bigger, more powerful,
more tireless.
[Sidenote: Apprentices.]
[Sidenote: Manual training.]