3. The Traits of Individual Method.
—The most general features of the method of knowing have been
given in our chapter on thinking. They are the features of the
reflective situation: Problem, collection and analysis of data,
projection and elaboration of suggestions or ideas, experimental
application and testing; the resulting conclusion or judgment. The
specific elements of an individual's method or way of attack upon a
problem are found ultimately in his native tendencies and his acquired
habits and interests. The method of one will vary from that of another
(and properly vary) as his original instinctive capacities vary,
as his past experiences and his preferences vary. Those who have already
studied these matters are in possession of information which will help
teachers in understanding the responses different pupils make, and help
them in guiding these responses to greater efficiency. Child-study,
psychology, and a knowledge of social environment supplement the
personal acquaintance gained by the teacher. But methods remain the
personal concern, approach, and attack of an individual, and no
catalogue can ever exhaust their diversity of form and tint.
Some attitudes may be named, however,-which are central in effective
intellectual ways of dealing with subject matter. Among the most
important are directness, open-mindedness, single-mindedness (or
whole-heartedness), and responsibility.
1.
It is easier to indicate what is meant by directness through negative
terms than in positive ones. Self-consciousness, embarrassment, and
constraint are its menacing foes. They indicate that a person is not
immediately concerned with subject matter. Something has come between
which deflects concern to side issues. A self-conscious person is
partly thinking about his problem and partly about what others think of
his performances. Diverted energy means loss of power and confusion of
ideas. Taking an attitude is by no means identical with being conscious
of one's attitude. The former is spontaneous, naive, and simple. It is
a sign of whole-souled relationship between a person and what he is
dealing with. The latter is not of necessity abnormal. It is sometimes
the easiest way of correcting a false method of approach, and of
improving the effectiveness of the means one is employing,—as golf
players, piano players, public speakers, etc., have occasionally to give
especial attention to their position and movements. But this need is
occasional and temporary. When it is effectual a person thinks of
himself in terms of what is to be done, as one means among others of the
realization of an end—as in the case of a tennis player practicing
to get the "feel" of a stroke. In abnormal cases, one thinks of himself
not as part of the agencies of execution, but as a separate
object—as when the player strikes an attitude thinking of the
impression it will make upon spectators, or is worried because of the
impression he fears his movements give rise to.
Confidence is a good name for what is intended by the term directness.
It should not be confused, however, with self-confidence which may be a
form of self-consciousness—or of "cheek." Confidence is not a name
for what one thinks or feels about his attitude it is not reflex. It
denotes the straightforwardness with which one goes at what he has to
do. It denotes not conscious trust in the efficacy of one's powers but
unconscious faith in the possibilities of the situation. It signifies
rising to the needs of the situation.
We have already pointed out (See p. 199)
the
objections to making students emphatically aware of the fact that they
are studying or learning. Just in the degree in which they are induced
by the conditions to be so aware, they are not studying and learning.
They are in a divided and complicated attitude. Whatever methods of a
teacher call a pupil's attention off from what he has to do and transfer
it to his own attitude towards what he is doing impair directness of concern
and action. Persisted in, the pupil acquires a permanent tendency to
fumble, to gaze about aimlessly, to look for some clew of action beside
that which the subject matter supplies. Dependence upon extraneous
suggestions and directions, a state of foggy confusion, take the place
of that sureness with which children (and grown-up people who have not
been sophisticated by "education") confront the situations of life.
2.
Open-mindedness. Partiality is, as we have seen, an accompaniment of
the existence of interest, since this means sharing, partaking, taking
sides in some movement. All the more reason, therefore, for an attitude
of mind which actively welcomes suggestions and relevant information
from all sides. In the chapter on Aims it was shown that foreseen ends
are factors in the development of a changing situation. They are the
means by which the direction of action is controlled. They are
subordinate to the situation, therefore, not the situation to them.
They are not ends in the sense of finalities to which everything must be
bent and sacrificed. They are, as foreseen, means of guiding the
development of a situation. A target is not the future goal of
shooting; it is the centering factor in a present shooting. Openness of
mind means accessibility of mind to any and every consideration that
will throw light upon the situation that needs to be cleared up, and
that will help determine the consequences of acting this way or that.
Efficiency in accomplishing ends which have been settled upon as
unalterable can coexist with a narrowly opened mind. But intellectual
growth means constant expansion of horizons and consequent formation of
new purposes and new responses. These are impossible without an active
disposition to welcome points of view hitherto alien; an active desire
to entertain considerations which modify existing purposes. Retention
of capacity to grow is the reward of such intellectual hospitality. The
worst thing about stubbornness of mind, about prejudices, is that they
arrest development; they shut the mind off from new stimuli.
Open-mindedness means retention of the childlike attitude;
closed-mindedness means premature intellectual old age.
Exorbitant desire for uniformity of procedure and for prompt external
results are the chief foes which the open-minded attitude meets in
school. The teacher who does not permit and encourage diversity of
operation in dealing with questions is imposing intellectual blinders
upon pupils—restricting their vision to the one path the teacher's
mind happens to approve. Probably the chief cause of devotion to
rigidity of method is, however, that it seems to promise speedy,
accurately measurable, correct results. The zeal for "answers" is the
explanation of much of the zeal for rigid and mechanical methods.
Forcing and overpressure have the same origin, and the same result upon
alert and varied intellectual interest.
Open-mindedness is not the same as empty-mindedness. To hang out a sign
saying "Come right in; there is no one at home" is not the equivalent of
hospitality. But there is a kind of passivity, willingness to let
experiences accumulate and sink in and ripen, which is an essential of
development. Results (external answers or solutions) may be hurried;
processes may not be forced. They take their own time to mature. Were
all instructors to realize that the quality of mental process, not the
production of correct answers, is the measure of educative growth
something hardly less than a revolution in teaching would be worked.
3.
Single-mindedness. So far as the word is concerned, much that was said
under the head of "directness" is applicable. But what the word is here
intended to convey is completeness of interest, unity of purpose; the
absence of suppressed but effectual ulterior aims for which the
professed aim is but a mask. It is equivalent to mental integrity.
Absorption, engrossment, full concern with subject matter for its own
sake, nurture it. Divided interest and evasion destroy it.
Intellectual integrity, honesty, and sincerity are at bottom not matters
of conscious purpose but of quality of active response. Their
acquisition is fostered of course by conscious intent, but
self-deception is very easy. Desires are urgent. When the demands and
wishes of others forbid their direct expression they are easily driven
into subterranean and deep channels. Entire surrender, and wholehearted
adoption of the course of action demanded by others are almost
impossible. Deliberate revolt or deliberate attempts to deceive others
may result. But the more frequent outcome is a confused and divided
state of interest in which one is fooled as to one's own real intent.
One tries to serve two masters at once. Social instincts, the strong
desire to please others and get their approval, social training, the
general sense of duty and of authority, apprehension of penalty, all
lead to a half-hearted effort to conform, to "pay attention to the
lesson," or whatever the requirement is. Amiable individuals want to do
what they are expected to do. Consciously the pupil thinks he is doing
this. But his own desires are not abolished. Only their evident
exhibition is suppressed. Strain of attention to what is hostile to
desire is irksome; in spite of one's conscious wish, the underlying
desires determine the main course of thought, the deeper emotional
responses. The mind wanders from the nominal subject and devotes itself
to what is intrinsically more desirable. A systematized divided
attention expressing the duplicity of the state of desire is the result.
One has only to recall his own experiences in school or at the present
time when outwardly employed in actions which do not engage one's
desires and purposes, to realize how prevalent is this attitude of
divided attention—double-mindedness. We are so used to it that we
take it for granted that a considerable amount of it is necessary. It
may be; if so, it is the more important to face its bad intellectual
effects. Obvious is the loss of energy of thought immediately available
when one is consciously trying (or trying to seem to try) to attend to
one matter, while unconsciously one's imagination is spontaneously going
out to more congenial affairs. More subtle and more permanently
crippling to efficiency of intellectual activity is a fostering of
habitual self-deception, with the confused sense of reality which
accompanies it. A double standard of reality, one for our own private
and more or less concealed interests, and another for public and
acknowledged concerns, hampers, in most of us, integrity and
completeness of mental action. Equally serious is the fact that a split
is set up between conscious thought and attention and impulsive blind
affection and desire. Reflective dealings with the material of
instruction is constrained and half-hearted; attention wanders. The
topics to which it wanders are unavowed and hence intellectually
illicit; transactions with them are furtive. The discipline that comes
from regulating response by deliberate inquiry having a purpose fails;
worse than that, the deepest concern and most congenial enterprises of
the imagination (since they center about the things dearest to desire)
are casual, concealed. They enter into action in ways which are
unacknowledged. Not subject to rectification by consideration of
consequences, they are demoralizing.
School conditions favorable to this division of mind between avowed,
public, and socially responsible undertakings, and private,
ill-regulated, and suppressed indulgences of thought are not hard to
find. What is sometimes called "stern discipline," i.e., external
coercive pressure, has this tendency. Motivation through rewards
extraneous to the thing to be done has a like effect. Everything that
makes schooling merely preparatory
(See ante, p. 64)
works in this direction. Ends being beyond the pupil's present grasp, other
agencies have to be found to procure immediate attention to assigned tasks.
Some responses are secured, but desires and affections not enlisted must
find other outlets. Not less serious is exaggerated emphasis upon drill
exercises designed to produce skill in action, independent of any
engagement of thought—exercises have no purpose but the production
of automatic skill. Nature abhors a mental vacuum. What do teachers
imagine is happening to thought and emotion when the latter get no
outlet in the things of immediate activity? Were they merely kept in
temporary abeyance, or even only calloused, it would not be a matter of
so much moment. But they are not abolished; they are not suspended;
they are not suppressed—save with reference to the task in
question. They follow their own chaotic and undisciplined course. What
is native, spontaneous, and vital in mental reaction goes unused and
untested, and the habits formed are such that these qualities become
less and less available for public and avowed ends.
4.
Responsibility. By responsibility as an element in intellectual
attitude is meant the disposition to consider in advance the probable
consequences of any projected step and deliberately to accept them: to
accept them in the sense of taking them into account, acknowledging them
in action, not yielding a mere verbal assent. Ideas, as we have seen,
are intrinsically standpoints and methods for bringing about a solution
of a perplexing situation; forecasts calculated to influence responses.
It is only too easy to think that one accepts a statement or believes a
suggested truth when one has not considered its implications; when one
has made but a cursory and superficial survey of what further things one
is committed to by acceptance. Observation and recognition, belief and
assent, then become names for lazy acquiescence in what is externally
presented.
It would be much better to have fewer facts and truths in
instruction—that is, fewer things supposedly accepted,—if a
smaller number of situations could be intellectually worked out to the
point where conviction meant something real—some identification of
the self with the type of conduct demanded by facts and foresight of
results. The most permanent bad results of undue complication of school
subjects and congestion of school studies and lessons are not the worry,
nervous strain, and superficial acquaintance that follow (serious as
these are), but the failure to make clear what is involved in really
knowing and believing a thing. Intellectual responsibility means severe
standards in this regard. These standards can be built up only through
practice in following up and acting upon the meaning of what is
acquired.
Intellectual thoroughness is thus another name for the attitude we
are considering. There is a kind of thoroughness which is almost purely
physical: the kind that signifies mechanical and exhausting drill upon
all the details of a subject. Intellectual thoroughness is seeing a
thing through. It depends upon a unity of purpose to which details are
subordinated, not upon presenting a multitude of disconnected details.
It is manifested in the firmness with which the full meaning of the
purpose is developed, not in attention, however "conscientious" it may
be, to the steps of action externally imposed and directed.
