12.
CHAPTER XII
THINKING IN EDUCATION:
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. 172).
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.
