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Page 36
Accordingly, one of the best fruits of the 'child-study' movement has
been to reinstate all these activities to their proper place in a sound
system of education. _Feed_ the growing human being, feed him with the
sort of experience for which from year to year he shows a natural
craving, and he will develop in adult life a sounder sort of mental
tissue, even though he may seem to be 'wasting' a great deal of his
growing time, in the eyes of those for whom the only channels of
learning are books and verbally communicated information.
It is not till adolescence is reached that the mind grows able to take
in the more abstract aspects of experience, the hidden similarities and
distinctions between things, and especially their causal sequences.
Rational knowledge of such things as mathematics, mechanics, chemistry,
and biology, is now possible; and the acquisition of conceptions of this
order form the next phase of education. Later still, not till
adolescence is well advanced, does the mind awaken to a systematic
interest in abstract human relations--moral relations, properly so
called,--to sociological ideas and to metaphysical abstractions.
This general order of sequence is followed traditionally of course in
the schoolroom. It is foreign to my purpose to do more than indicate
that general psychological principle of the successive order of
awakening of the faculties on which the whole thing rests. I have spoken
of it already, apropos of the transitoriness of instincts. Just as many
a youth has to go permanently without an adequate stock of conceptions
of a certain order, because experiences of that order were not yielded
at the time when new curiosity was most acute, so it will conversely
happen that many another youth is spoiled for a certain subject of study
(although he would have enjoyed it well if led into it at a later age)
through having had it thrust upon him so prematurely that disgust was
created, and the bloom quite taken off from future trials. I think I
have seen college students unfitted forever for 'philosophy' from having
taken that study up a year too soon.
In all these later studies, verbal material is the vehicle by which the
mind thinks. The abstract conceptions of physics and sociology may, it
is true, be embodied in visual or other images of phenomena, but they
need not be so; and the truth remains that, after adolescence has begun,
"words, words, words," must constitute a large part, and an always
larger part as life advances, of what the human being has to learn. This
is so even in the natural sciences, so far as these are causal and
rational, and not merely confined to description. So I go back to what I
said awhile ago apropos of verbal memorizing. The more accurately words
are learned, the better, if only the teacher make sure that what they
signify is also understood. It is the failure of this latter condition,
in so much of the old-fashioned recitation, that has caused that
reaction against 'parrot-like reproduction' that we are so familiar with
to-day. A friend of mine, visiting a school, was asked to examine a
young class in geography. Glancing, at the book, she said: "Suppose you
should dig a hole in the ground, hundreds of feet deep, how should you
find it at the bottom,--warmer or colder than on top?" None of the class
replying, the teacher said: "I'm sure they know, but I think you don't
ask the question quite rightly. Let me try." So, taking the book, she
asked: "In what condition is the interior of the globe?" and received
the immediate answer from half the class at once: "The interior of the
globe is in a condition of _igneous fusion_." Better exclusive
object-teaching than such verbal recitations as that; and yet verbal
reproduction, intelligently connected with more objective work, must
always play a leading, and surely _the_ leading, part in education. Our
modern reformers, in their books, write too exclusively of the earliest
years of the pupil. These lend themselves better to explicit treatment;
and I myself, in dwelling so much upon the native impulses, and
object-teaching, and anecdotes, and all that, have paid my tribute to
the line of least resistance in describing. Yet away back in childhood
we find the beginnings of purely intellectual curiosity, and the
intelligence of abstract terms. The object-teaching is mainly to
_launch_ the pupils, with some concrete conceptions of the facts
concerned, upon the more abstract ideas.
To hear some authorities on teaching, however, you would suppose that
geography not only began, but ended with the school-yard and neighboring
hill, that physics was one endless round of repeating the same sort of
tedious weighing and measuring operation: whereas a very few examples
are usually sufficient to set the imagination free on genuine lines, and
then what the mind craves is more rapid, general, and abstract
treatment. I heard a lady say that she had taken her child to the
kindergarten, "but he is so bright that he saw through it immediately."
Too many school children 'see' as immediately 'through' the namby-pamby
attempts of the softer pedagogy to lubricate things for them, and make
them interesting. Even they can enjoy abstractions, provided they be of
the proper order; and it is a poor compliment to their rational appetite
to think that anecdotes about little Tommies and little Jennies are the
only kind of things their minds can digest.
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