IV

There are one or two points of a general nature in connection with the

art of study that should be emphasized. In the first place, the

upper-grade and high-school pupils are, I believe, mature enough to

appreciate in some degree what knowledge really means. One of the

fallacies of which I was possessed on completing my work in the lower

schools was the belief that there are some men who know everything. I

naturally concluded that the superintendent of schools was one of these

men; the family physician was another; the leading man in my town was a

third; and any one who ever wrote a book was put, _ex officio_ so to

speak, into this class without further inquiry. One of the most

astounding revelations of my later education was to learn that, after

all, the amount of real knowledge in this world, voluminous though it

seems, is after all pitiably small. Of opinion and speculation we have a

surplus, but of real, downright, hard fact, our capital is still most

insignificant. And I wonder if something could not be done in the high

school to teach pupils the difference between fact and opinion, and

something also of the slow, laborious process through which real facts

are accumulated. How many mistakes of life are due to the lack of the

judicial attitude right here. What mistakes we all make when we try to

evaluate writings outside of our own special field of knowledge or

activity. Nothing depresses me to-day quite so much as the readiness

with which laymen mistake opinion for fact in the field of psychology

and education,--and I suppose that my own hasty acceptance of statements

in other fields would have a similar effect upon the specialists of

those fields.

Can general education help us out at all in this matter? I have only

one or two suggestions to make, and even these may not be worth a great

deal. In the recent Polar controversy, the sympathies of the general

public were, I think, at the outset with Cook. This was perhaps,

natural, and yet the trained mind ought to have withheld judgment for

one reason if for no other,--and that one reason was Peary's long Arctic

service, his unquestioned mastery of the technique of polar travel, his

general reputation for honesty and caution in advancing opinions. By all

the lessons that history teaches, Peary's word should have had

precedence over Cook's, for Peary was a specialist, while Cook was only

an amateur. And yet the general public discounted entirely those

lessons, and trusted rather the novice, with what results it is now

unnecessary to review,--and in nine cases out of ten, the results will

be the same.

Could we not, as part of our work in training pupils to study, also

teach them to give some sort of an evaluation to the authorities that

they consult? Could we not teach them that, in nine cases out of ten, at

least, the man who has the message most worth listening to is the man

who has worked the hardest and the longest in his field, and who enjoys

the best reputation among his fellow-workers? Sometimes, I admit, the

rule does not work, and especially with men whose reputations as

authorities have outlived their period of productivity, but even this

mistake could be guarded against. Certainly high-school pupils ought

distinctly to understand that the authors of their text-books are not

always the most learned men or the greatest authorities in the fields

that they treat. The use of biographical dictionaries, of the books that

are appearing in various fields giving brief biographies and often some

authoritative estimate of the workers in these fields, is important in

this connection.

McMurry recommends that pupils be encouraged to take a critical attitude

toward the principles they are set to master,--to judge, as he says, the

soundness and worth of the statements that they learn. This is certainly

good advice, and wherever the pupil can intelligently deal with real

sources, it is well frequently to have him check up the statements of

secondary sources. But, after all, this is the age of the specialist,

and to trust one's untrained judgment in a field remote from one's

knowledge and experience is likely to lead to unfortunate results. We

have all sorts of illustrations from the ignorant man who will not trust

the physician or the health official in matters of sanitation; because

he lacks the proper perspective, he jumps to the conclusion that the

specialist is a fraud. Would it not be well to supplement McMurry's

suggestion by the one that I have just made,--that is, that we train

pupils how to evaluate authorities as well as facts,--how to protect

themselves from the quack and the faker who live like parasites upon the

ignorance of laymen, both in medicine, in education, and in Arctic

exploration?

And I believe that there is a place, also, in the high school,

especially in connection with the work in science and history, for

giving pupils some idea of how knowledge is really gained. I should not

teach science exclusively by the laboratory method, nor history

exclusively by the source method, but I should certainly take frequent

opportunity to let pupils work through some simple problems from the

beginnings, struggling with the conditions somewhat as the discoverers

themselves struggled; following up "blind leads" and toilsomely

returning for a fresh start; meeting with discouragement; and finally

feeling, perhaps, some of the joy that comes with success after

struggle; and all in order that they may know better and appreciate more

fully the cost and the worth of that intellectual heritage which the

master-minds of the world have bequeathed to the present and the future.

And along with this, as they master the principles of science, let them

learn also the human side of science,--the story of Newton, withholding

his great discovery for years until he could be absolutely certain that

it was a law; until he could get the very commonplace but obstreperous

moon into harmony with his law of falling bodies;--the story of Darwin,

with his twenty-odd years of the most patient and persistent kind of

toil; delving into the most unpromising materials, reading the driest

books, always on the lookout for the facts that would point the way to

the explanation of species;--the story of Morse and his bitter struggle

against poverty, and sickness, and innumerable disappointments up to

the time when, in advancing years, success crowned his efforts.

All this may seem very remote from the prosaic task of teaching pupils

how to study; and yet it will lend its influence toward the attainment

of that end. For, after all, we must lead our pupils to see that some

books, in spite of their formidable difficulties and their apparent

abstractions, are still close to life, and that the truth which lies in

books, and which we wish them to assimilate, has been wrought out of

human experience, and not brought down miraculously from some remote

storehouse of wisdom that is accessible only to the elect. We poke a

good deal of fun at book learning nowadays, and there is a pedantic type

of book learning that certainly deserves all the ridicule that can be

heaped upon it. But it is not wise to carry satire and ridicule too far

in any direction, and especially when it may mean creating in young

minds a distrust of the force that, more than any other single factor,

has operated to raise man above the savage.

V

To teach the child the art of study means, then, that we take every

possible occasion to impress upon his mind the value of study as a means

of solving real and vital problems, and that, with this as an incentive,

we gradually and persistently and systematically lead him to grasp the

method of study as a method,--that is, slowly and gradually to abstract

the method from the particular cases to which he applies it and to

emotionalize it,--to make it an ideal. Only in this way, so far as we

may know, can the art be so generalized as to find ready application in

his later life. To this end, it is essential that the steps be taken

repeatedly,--not begun to-day and never thought of again until next

year,--but daily, even hourly, insuring a little growth. This means,

too, not only that the teacher must possess a high degree of

patience,--that first principle of pedagogic skill,--but also that he

have a comprehensive grasp of the problem, and the ability to separate

the woods from the trees, so that, to him at least, the chief aim will

never be lost to view.

But, even at its best, the task is a severe one, and we need, here as

elsewhere in education, carefully controlled tests and experiments, that

will enable us to get at the facts. Above all, let me protest against

the incidental theory of teaching pupils how to study. To adopt the

incidental policy in any field of education,--whether in arithmetic, or

spelling, or reading; whether in developing the power of reasoning or

the memory, or the art of study,--is to throw wide open the doors that

lead to the lines of least resistance, to lax methods, to easy honors,

to weakened mental fiber, and to scamped work. Just as the pernicious

doctrine of the subconscious is the first and last refuge of the

psycho-faker, so incidental learning is the first and last refuge of

soft pedagogy. And I mean by incidental learning, going at a teaching

task in an indolent, unreflective, hit-or-miss fashion in the hope that

somehow or other from this process will emerge the very definite results

that we desire.