School of thought

“ Our errors in education, so far as we have erred, turn upon the conception we form of ‘mind,’ and the theory which has filtered through to most teachers implies the out-of-date notion of the development of ‘faculties,’ a notion which itself rests on the axiom that thought is no more than a function of the brain. ”

“ If we bend our thoughts to this subject, we shall gain insight into the meaning and purpose of education, which is nothing else than the urging of intellect and conscience to the conquest of the world, and to the clear perception and practical acknowledgment of the primal and fundamental truth that man is man in virtue of his thought and love.
Instruction, which is but part of education, has for its object the development of the intellect and the transmission of knowledge. This, whether we consider the individual or society, is indispensable. ”

“ But we have no unifying principle, no definite aim; in fact, no philosophy of education. As a stream can rise no higher than its source, so it is probable that no educational effort can rise above the whole scheme of thought which gives it birth ”

“ And lastly in the highest teachings, which have to do, not with the objective surroundings, but with the man himself, with his thoughts and aspirations, with the expression of these in literature, in art, in ethics, and politics, and philosophy, the student will find enough to develop the highest powers of thought, as he wrestles with the problems of life, when he has reached the later period of study. ”

“ Does any one claim, or imagine, that school-books contain much nourishment for the heart and soul, or the moral feelings, or love of beauty? Upon what grounds, does any one claim, or imagine, that such things are less important to the growth of character, and a cheerful disposition, and fine standards of conduct, than the training of the intellect? If we are perfectly satisfied that the method employed to train the intellect does not and need not interfere with a corresponding development of those other sides of human nature—that is one thing. ”

“ To perceive accurately and to think correctly is the aim of all mental training. Heart and conscience are more than the mere intellect. Yet we know not how much the clear, clean-cut thought, the intellectual vision, sharp and true, may aid even these. Undigested learning is as oppressive as undigested food ”

“ The mind thinks with what it knows; and, if you alter the knowledge in any one whit, you alter the thinking instrumentality in proportion. Our whole practice of education is based on this idea, and yet somehow the idea is allowed to lurk. ”

“ We can give only a negative answer. Knowledge is not instruction, information, scholarship, a well-stored memory. It is passed, like the light of a torch, from mind to mind, and the flame can be kindled at original minds only. Thought, we know, breeds thought; it is as vital thought touches our minds that our ideas are vitalized, and out of our ideas comes our conduct of life. The case for reform hardly needs demonstration, but now we begin to see the way of reform. The direct and immediate impact of great minds upon his own mind is necessary to the education of a child. ”

“ But the true science of education is something far more than this. It implies a skilful observation of the past, and that long foresight of the future, which experience and judgment united afford. It is the art of seeing, not the immediate effect only, but the series of effects which may follow any particular thought or [49] feeling, in the infinite variety of possible combinations—the art often of drawing virtue from apparent evil, and of averting evil that may rise from apparent good. ”

“ The problem, then, is to bring the pupil to a fuller understanding of the character of his impulses to action, and the relative value of each. In many ways the neglected elements of his nature may be brought into consciousness and emphasized. Everything that creates conceptions of ideal conduct, all concrete illustrations in the social life of the school, all conscious exercise of power in right ways, contribute toward his self-realization. ”

“ But these principles are obvious and simple enough, and, when we consider that at present education is chaotic for want of a unifying theory, and that there happens to be no other comprehensive theory in the field which is in line with modern thought and fits every occasion, might it not be well to try one which is immediately practicable and always pleasant and has proved itself by producing many capable, serviceable, dutiful men and women of sound judgment and willing mind? ”

“ Now the thought that we choose is commonly the thought that we ought to think and the part of the teacher is to afford to each child a full reservoir of the right thought of the world to draw from. For right thinking is by no means a matter of self-expression. Right thought flows upon the stimulus of an idea, and ideas are stored as we have seen in books and pictures and the lives of men and nations ”

“ Among the students of mind, there is an old and inveterate quarrel about the origin of our ideas—one school holding that they are intuitions existing in an abstract mental world, and independent of all experience; and another school holding that all ideas are derivable from the experience of individuals. ”

“ But the distance between twenty and sixty—the life beginning and the life advancing toward its close— was frequently apparent; also between an active, original mind, requiring humanity for its study, and one whose whole bent was among the dry bones of ancient learning—the difference, in short, between learning and knowledge—the mere student and the man who only uses study as a means to the perfecting of his whole nature, his complete existence as a human being. ”

“ The education of which I speak is expansion and discipline of mind rather than learning; and its tendency is not so much to form profound dogmatists, or erudite canonists, or acute casuists, as to cultivate a habit of mind, which, for want of a better word, may be called philosophical; to enlarge the intellect, to strengthen and supple its faculties, to enable it to take connected views of things and their relations, and to see clear amid the mazes of human error and through the mists of human passion. ”

“ It is of infinite importance that the intellect should have been previously developed by a course of study which shall train the student in logic and reasoning and familiarize him with natural as well as with moral and mental philosophy. ”

“ To give a real assent to the essential truth that underlies and animates the principle is another. The way in which the teacher too often conducts his school leads one to infer that the intuitive, instinctive side of him—the side that is nearest to practice—has somehow or other held [7] intercourse with the inner meaning of that "truism" which he repeats so glibly, and has rejected it as antagonistic to the traditional assumptions on which he bases his life. ”

“ His central thought appears more definitely through the philosophical principles in his famous Essay concerning the Human Understanding, and through the intellectual training suggested in his other educational work, Conduct of the Understanding, which was originally an additional book and application of the Essay. ”

“ To be taught to read—what is the use of that, if you know not whether what you read is false or true? To be taught to write or to speak—but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think [Pg 284] —nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at once, and both true. ”

“ Had education formed any part of the system of the school where he was instructed--had he been taught how best to use the gifts that were imparted--had he been inured to regulate the mind that was stored--had he been habituated to draw just conclusions from all he read, instead of merely being taught to read, that would have been in some degree education, and it might have corrected, to a certain point, the darker schooling he received at home. Well might the great philosopher, who in some things most grossly misused the knowledge he himself possessed, pronounce that "Knowledge is power;" ”

“ True education is practicable only by a true philosopher. Judge, then, what prospect a philosophical method now has of being acted out! Knowing so little as we yet do of psychology, and ignorant as our teachers are of that little, what chance has a system which requires psychology for its basis? ”

“ It is a process of education in the true sense, not of the suppression of natural impulses nor even of the instillation of sound rules and maxims for their control, not of the pressing in but of the leading out of the individual’s special tendencies. ”

“ The first intellectual operation in which I arrived at any proficiency, was dissecting a bad argument, and finding in what part the fallacy lay: and though whatever capacity of this sort I attained, was due to the fact that it was an intellectual exercise in which I was most perseveringly drilled by my father, yet it is also true that the school logic, and the mental habits acquired in studying it, were among the principal instruments of this drilling. ”

“ Do they admit man to be the simple work of instruction, of education? Do they maintain that our interior world is nothing more than a series of phenomena caused by impressions, and that it would have been other than what it is, had it had other impressions? ”

“ Real-schule, a German school in which languages, sciences, and arts are taught to qualify for apprenticeship in some special business or craft.
Reason, in philosophy is more than mere understanding or reasoning power; it is the constitutive and regulative soul of the universe assumed to live and breathe in the inner life or soul of man, as that develops itself in the creations of human genius working in accord with and revealing the deep purpose of the Maker. ”

“ In the former case, the individual is left to the train of thought in the mind, which appears to afford no mental cultivation;—whereas, in the latter, the mind is, by the acts of comparing, judging, trying, and deciding, which the nature of his occupation renders necessary, constantly excited to active thought,—that is, to the reiteration of the several ideas presented to it. ”

“ He denounced our wordy and bookish education as baseless and unreal, and demanded such a change in our systems of instruction as shall bring the pupils face to face with Nature herself, and call out the mind by direct exercise upon phenomena—the facts, laws, relations, and realities of the world of experience. ”

“ From such mistakes in education a better psychology or a kinder heart is beginning to preserve the present generation; we need, therefore, waste no more words on the theory that the purpose of education is to thwart or eradicate nature. ”

“ But, gentlemen, the exclusive devotion to mental and moral philosophy as contradistinguished from physical science, Exclusive devotion to Philosophy. and without sufficient subjection to the discipline of severer studies, such as logic, mathematics and science—is apt to develop the very faults to which your mental constitution is prone. The imaginative faculties rise and spread so as to overshadow the reason; the idealistic power flourishes so excessively as to draw the vigour away from the realistic faculties. ”

“ What we do not call education is more precious than that which we call so. We form no guess, at the time of receiving a thought, of its comparative value. And education often wastes its effort in attempts to thwart and balk this natural magnetism, which is sure to select what belongs to it. ”

“ It plainly teaches us, that the young ought to be made aware of the comparative nothingness of temporal and sensual objects, when placed in competition with those which refer to their souls and eternity; and that the subjects which are to be taught them in the school, should tend to produce these feelings.—But this is not always the case; and even when the subjects are in themselves unobjectionable, the methods taken for teaching them frequently neutralize their effects. ”

“ Human nature has not failed; what has failed us is philosophy, and that applied philosophy which is called education. Philosophy, all the philosophies, old and new, land us on the horns of a dilemma; either we do well by ourselves and seek our own perfection of nature or condition, or we do well by others to our own loss or deterioration. If there is a mean, philosophy does not declare it. ”

“ The laws of psychology, or the capabilities and methods of mind-activity, are themselves the fundamental laws of teaching, which is the act of exciting normal and profitable mind-action. Beyond these fundamental laws, the principles of education are to be derived inductively. ”

“ The school considers not only scholarship but also the sum of all that it is, its culture, its attainment, its moral force, as these elements are expressed in its living members, its students and its teachers—in short, its idealism. [Pg 32] Idealism is having one's life governed by ideals, and an ideal is a perfect conception of that which is good, beautiful and true. ”

“ At last, knowledge must [99] be put into its true place in the living activity of man. And we must know deeply, in order even to do that.
So a new conception of the meaning of education.
Education means leading out the individual nature in each man and woman to its true fullness. You can't do that by stimulating the mind. To pump education into the mind is fatal. That which sublimates from the dynamic consciousness into the mental consciousness has alone any value. ”

“ This branch of learning, too, makes the soul in the highest degree observant, capable of perceiving the true and detecting the false, of discovering correspondences and proportions, so as to hunt out for similarity in things dissimilar; and conducts us to the discovery of length without breadth, and superficial extent without thickness, and an indivisible point, and transports to intellectual objects from those of sense.
The studies of philosophy, therefore, and philosophy itself, are aids in treating of the truth. ”