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Page 10
If we reflect upon the various ideals of education that are prevalent in
the different countries, we see that what they all aim at is to organize
capacities for conduct. This is most immediately obvious in Germany,
where the explicitly avowed aim of the higher education is to turn the
student into an instrument for advancing scientific discovery. The
German universities are proud of the number of young specialists whom
they turn out every year,--not necessarily men of any original force of
intellect, but men so trained to research that when their professor
gives them an historical or philological thesis to prepare, or a bit of
laboratory work to do, with a general indication as to the best method,
they can go off by themselves and use apparatus and consult sources in
such a way as to grind out in the requisite number of months some little
pepper-corn of new truth worthy of being added to the store of extant
human information on that subject. Little else is recognized in Germany
as a man's title to academic advancement than his ability thus to show
himself an efficient instrument of research.
In England, it might seem at first sight as if the higher education of
the universities aimed at the production of certain static types of
character rather than at the development of what one may call this
dynamic scientific efficiency. Professor Jowett, when asked what Oxford
could do for its students, is said to have replied, "Oxford can teach an
English gentleman how to _be_ an English gentleman." But, if you ask
what it means to 'be' an English gentleman, the only reply is in terms
of conduct and behavior. An English gentleman is a bundle of
specifically qualified reactions, a creature who for all the emergencies
of life has his line of behavior distinctly marked out for him in
advance. Here, as elsewhere, England expects every man to do his duty.
V. THE NECESSITY OF REACTIONS
If all this be true, then immediately one general aphorism emerges which
ought by logical right to dominate the entire conduct of the teacher in
the classroom.
_No reception without reaction, no impression without correlative
expression_,--this is the great maxim which the teacher ought never to
forget.
An impression which simply flows in at the pupil's eyes or ears, and in
no way modifies his active life, is an impression gone to waste. It is
physiologically incomplete. It leaves no fruits behind it in the way of
capacity acquired. Even as mere impression, it fails to produce its
proper effect upon the memory; for, to remain fully among the
acquisitions of this latter faculty, it must be wrought into the whole
cycle of our operations. Its _motor consequences_ are what clinch it.
Some effect due to it in the way of an activity must return to the mind
in the form of the _sensation of having acted_, and connect itself with
the impression. The most durable impressions are those on account of
which we speak or act, or else are inwardly convulsed.
The older pedagogic method of learning things by rote, and reciting them
parrot-like in the schoolroom, rested on the truth that a thing merely
read or heard, and never verbally reproduced, contracts the weakest
possible adhesion in the mind. Verbal recitation or reproduction is thus
a highly important kind of reactive behavior on our impressions; and it
is to be feared that, in the reaction against the old parrot-recitations
as the beginning and end of instruction, the extreme value of verbal
recitation as an element of complete training may nowadays be too much
forgotten.
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 conceptions
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 notebooks, 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 the manual training schools; not because they will give
us a people more handy and practical for domestic life and better
skilled in trades, but because they will give us citizens with an
entirely different intellectual fibre. 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 wrought into the mind, remain there as lifelong 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 functions to a minimum.
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