Take Nothing for Granted. 87 PART I. The Teacher's Teaching Work. CHAPTER 3. Elements of the Teaching Process. thought that their souls were in no need of cure would raise their hands. Up went several hands. At this she asked what they understood by having their souls cured. Promptly there came back the answer from a bright little boy: "You mean when the bottom of our feet don't ache." An odd conception that, but one which, while it remained, was a hopeless barrier to making the truth clear concerning spiritual wholeness. A gentleman told me that, when he was a lad, he went to his Christian employer and sought counsel under his burden of conscious sin. "Your only hope," was the reply, "is in accepting Jesus Christ as the propitiation for A confusing your sins." What "propitiation" meant, that teacher did not make clear; nor did the scholar know for himself; and so, for a time, it barred the way of salvation, instead of pointing it out. explanation. are clear. In view of one's constant liability to use words which his hearers do not understand, or which for the time being they misapprehend, a teacher has the responsibility and the duty of being always careful to make clear to his scholars the truths he would teach them. And in this effort a teacher may not Be sure you rest satisfied with the mere declaration of the truth, in words that seem to himself explicit and plain; nor can he be sure that he has made the truth clear, just because his scholars re-state to him in the same words the truth he has declared to them. Telling a thing is not in itself teaching that thing; nor is PART I. CHAPTER 3. A return message. Words as barriers. hearing a recitation, teaching the thing recited. The words which the teacher employs in the telling, may be words which the scholar does not understand; or, again, the scholar may misapprehend the point and the purport of the teacher's statements, even while he knows the meaning of the several words employed. If this be the case as the scholar hears the words, it is in no way changed by the scholar's repeating the words back again just as he heard them. You send a message in cipher, by telegraph. The opera tor at the other end of the line "repeats" back that message just as he received it, in order to show that it was sent correctly. But neither the receiving of these words nor the repeating them, by that operator, gives him any idea of their true meaning; for they are in cipher. A great deal of the ordinary class-teaching in Sunday-school is in cipher; a cipher of which the key has never been given to the scholars. The undue reliance on mere words as an agency in the work of imparting knowledge, has been a prominent cause of retarding the attainment of knowledge in the minds of scholars who have been taught to memorize words, in our week-day schools and our Sunday-schools, under the impression that the knowledge of the words was, to a certain extent at least, identical with a knowledge of the truths symbolized by those words. Some years ago a notable paper appeared in the London Journal of Psychological Cultivating Stupidity. 89 PART I. The Teacher's Teaching Work. CHAPTER 3. Elements of the Teaching Process. Medicine, on The Artificial Production of Stupidity in Schools. It started out with the story of a learned judge who praised a retiring witness by saying: "You are entitled to great credit, sir. You must have taken infinite pains with yourself. No man could naturally be so stupid." Then it went on to show that, in this process of unintelligent memorizing and of rote-recitations, and in this attention to the mere words of a lesson under consideration, there is actually no exercise of the distinctive braincharacter which elevates man above the lower order of animals. "Upon testing the educational systems of the present day by even the most elementary principles of psychology," said this article, " it becomes apparent that a very large number of children receive precisely the kind of training which has been be- The learned stowed upon a learned pig." It even went farther and declared: "We conceive that the recent development of nervous physiology entitles us to maintain that learning by rote is at once the effect and the evidence of operations limited to the sensorial ganglia; and that such operations have no tendency, however they may be complicated or prolonged, to excite those functions of the cerebrum which are the peculiar attributes of humanity;" which is only a scientific and technical way of saying, that fastening words in the mind is never identical, nor ever can be identical, with getting ideas into the mind; that if you would have a scholar in advance of a talking pig process. PART I. CHAPTER 3. Pope's What is involved. parrot or a learned pig, you must find some way of making clear to him what you would cause him to know, apart from merely telling him words, or from having him memorize words. Nor is this a truth which has been recognized, for the first time, in our generation. In Pope's Dunciad, when the Goddess of Dullness comes in her majesty "to destroy order and science, and to substitute the Kingdom of the Dull upon earth," the geniuses of the schools approach her, and "assure her of their care to advance her cause by confining youth to words, and keeping them out of the way of real knowledge." Their reasoning is: "Since man from beast by words is known, Words are man's province, words we teach alone. We ply the memory, we load the brain, Confine the thought, to exercise the breath, And keep them in the pale of words till death." That will answer for the servants of the Goddess of Dullness; but it is not the way for those who would cause their scholars to know the truth, and who would make clear that which they would cause them to know of the truth. Making the truth clear to a scholar, involves a clear understanding of the truth by the teacher; his clear understanding, also, of the scholar's measure of knowledge, and of the scholar's methods of Clearness Indispensable. thought and speech. It involves, moreover, close attention on the scholar's part, and wise methods of exhibiting, explaining, and illustrating the truth on the part of the teacher. Without his making clear the truth which he would teach, the teacher may indeed know that truth for himself, but he cannot cause the scholar to know it; and teaching is causing one to know. No teaching of a truth is possible until that truth is made clear to him who is to be taught. 91 PART I. The Teacher's Teaching Work. CHAPTER 3. Elements of the Teaching Process. |