THE

ECLECTIC TEACHER

AND KENTUCKY SCHOOL JOURNAL:

FOR TEACHERS AND FRIENDS OF EDUCATION,

7410

JULY, 1876.

IN

WHAT IS TEACHING?

N the first place, teaching is not simply telling. A class may be told a thing twenty times over, and yet not know it. Talking to a class is not, necessarily, teaching. I have known many teachers who were brimful of information, and were good talkers, and who discoursed to their classes with ready utterance a large part of the time allotted to instruction; yet an examination of their classes showed little advancement in knowledge.

There are several time-honored metaphors on this subject, which need to be received with some grains of allowance, if we would get at an exact idea of what teaching is. Chiseling rude marble into the finished statue; giving the impression of the seal upon the soft wax; pouring water into an empty vessel;— all these comparisons lack one essential element of likeness. The mind is, indeed, in one sense, empty, and needs to be filled. It is yielding, and needs to be impressed. It is rude, and needs polishing. But it is not, like the marble, the wax or the vessel, a passive recipient of external influence. It is itself a living power. It is acted upon only by stirring up its own activities. The operative upon mind, unlike the operative upon matter, must have the active, voluntary co-operation of that upon which he works. The teacher is doing his work, only so far as he gets work from the scholar. The very essence and root of the work are in the scholar, not in the teacher. No one, in fact, in an important sense, is taught at all, except so far as he is self-taught. The teacher may be useful, as an auxiliary, in causing this action on the part of the scholar. But the one indispensable, vital thing in all learning, is in the scholar himself. The

old Romans, in their word "education" (educere, to draw out,) seem to have come nearer to the true idea than any other people have done. The teacher is to draw out the resources of the pupil. Yet even this word comes short of the exact truth. The teacher must put in, as well as draw out. No process of mere pumping will draw out from a child's mind knowledge which is not there. All the power of the Socratic method, could it be applied by Socrates himself, would be unavailing to draw from a child's mind, by mere questioning, a knowledge, for instance, of chemical affinity, of the solar system, of the temperature of the Gulf Stream, or of the doctrine of the resurrection.

What, then, is teaching?

Teaching is causing any one to know. Now, no one can be made to know a thing but by the act of his own powers. His own sense, his own memory, his own powers of reason, perception and judgment, must be exercised. The function of the teacher is to bring about this exercise of the pupil's faculties. The means to do this are infinite in variety. They should be varied according to the wants and character of the individual to be taught. One needs to be told a thing; he learns most readily by the ear. Another needs to use his eyes; he must see a thing, either in the book or in nature. But neither eye nor ear, nor any other sense or faculty, will avail to the acquisition of knowledge, unless the power of attention is cultivated. Attention, then, is the first act or power of the mind that must be aroused. It is the very foundation of all progress in knowledge, and the means of awakening it constitute the first step in the educational

art.

When, by any means, positive knowledge-facts-are once in possession of the mind, something must next be done to prevent their slipping away. You may tell a class the history of a certain event; you may give them a description of a certain place or person; or you may let them read it; and you may secure such a degree of attention that, at the time of the reading or the description, they shall have a fair, intelligible comprehension of what has been described or read. The facts are, for the time, actually in the possession of the mind. Now, if the mind was, according to the old notion, merely a vessel to be filled, the process would be complete. But mind is not an empty vessel. It is a living essence, with powers and processes of its own. And experience shows us that in the case of a class of undisciplined pupils, facts, even when fairly placed in possession of the mind, often remain there about as long as the shadow of a passing cloud remains upon the landscape, and make about as much impression.

The teacher must seek, then, not only to get knowledge into the mind, but to fix it there. In other words, the power of the memory must be strengthened. Teaching, then, most truly, and in every stage of it, is a strictly co-operative process. You cannot cause any one to know by merely pouring out stores of knowledge in his hearing, any more than you can make his body grow by spreading the contents of your market basket at his feet. You must rouse his power of attention, that he may lay hold of and receive, and make his own the knowledge you offer him. You must awaken and strengthen the power of memory within him, that he may retain what he receives, and thus grow in knowledge, as the body, by a like process, grows in strength and muscle. In other words, learning, so far as the mind of the learner is concerned, is a growth; and

teaching, so far as the teacher is concerned, is doing whatever is necessary to cause that growth.

Let us proceed a step further in this matter.

One of the ancients observes that a lamp loses none of its own light by allowing another lamp to be lit from it. He uses the illustration to enforce the duty of liberality in imparting our knowledge to others. Knowledge, he says, unlike other treasures, is not diminished by giving.

The illustration fails to express the whole truth. This imparting of knowledge to others not only does not impoverish the donor, but it actually increases his riches. Docendo discimus. By teaching, we learn. A man grows in knowledge by the very act of communicating it. The reason for this is obvious. In order to communicate to the mind of another a thought which is in our own mind, we must give to the thought definite shape and form. We must handle it and pack it up for safe conveyance. Thus, the mere act of giving a thought expression in words, fixes it more deeply in our own minds. Not only so. We can, in fact, very rarely be said to be in full possession of a thought ourselves, until, by the tongue or the pen, we have communicated it to some one else. The expression of it, in some form, seems necessary to give it, even in our own minds, a definite shape and a lasting impression.

Some teachers seem to be ambitious to do a great deal of talking. The measure of their success, in their own eyes, is their ability to keep up a continued stream of talk for the greater part of the hour. This is, of course, better than the embarrassing silence sometimes seen, where neither teacher nor scholar has anything to say. But, at the best, it is only the pouring into the exhausted receiver enacted over again. We can never be reminded too often that there is no teaching except so far as there is active co-operation on the part of the learner. The mind receiving must reproduce and give back what it gets. This is the indispensable condition of making any knowledge really our own. The very best teaching I have ever seen, has been where the teacher said comparatively little. The teacher was, of course, brimful of the subject. He could give the needed information at exactly the right point and in the right quantity. But for every word given by the teacher there were many words of answering reproduction on the part of the scholars. Youthful minds, under such tutelage, grow apace.

It is, indeed, a high and difficult achievement in the educational art to get young persons thus to bring forth their thoughts freely for examination and correction. A pleasant countenance and a gentle manner, inviting and inspiring confidence, have something to do with the matter. But, whatever the means for accomplishing this end, the end itself is indispensable. The scholar's tongue must be unloosed as well as the teacher's. The scholar's thoughts must be broached as well as the teacher's. Indeed, the statement needs very little qualification or abatement, that a scholar has learned nothing from us except what he has expressed to us again in words. The teacher who is accustomed to harangue his scholars with a continuous stream of words, no matter how full of weighty meaning his words may be, is yet deceiving himself if he thinks that his scholars are materially benefited by his intellectual activity, unless it is so guided as to awaken and exercise theirs. If, after a suitable period, he will honestly examine his scholars on the subjects on which he has himself been so

productive, he will find that he has been only pouring water into a sieve. Teaching can never be this one-sided process. Of all the things we attempt, it is the one most essentially and necessarily a co-operative process. There must be the joint action of the teacher's mind and the scholar's mind. A teacher teaches at all only so far as he causes this coactive energy of the pupil's mind. -The Teacher.

MUCH

HOW TO STUDY.

BY PROF. CHARLES A. MOREY.

UCH is said and written lately about the memorizing of lessons. The practice is decried by all. But in spite of them, the fact remains whether the lesson be from the text book or from the teacher's topic book, nine pupils out of ten will endeavor to fix the words in the mind. They may be told not to do it, as is generally the case; but they do it because they have no clear conception of any other method of study.

Not one High School student in a dozen can read a topic in Natural Philosophy and gain the idea as free from the particular words of the book. The habit of word-retaining is so strong upon them that they cannot shake it off. Where such a pupil recites a definition, he has the book in the mind's eye; he is thinking of and following a certain paragraph on some left-hand page in the book.

The pupils are not wholly to blame for this. They have never been shown the proper way in which to study; the proper way to read; the proper way to think. Farther than this, most teachers encourage memoriter work by their way of questioning. They, too, have the text book in mind, if not before them, and their questions are so put that they draw more upon the memory than any other faculty.

The greatest difficulty against which teachers of the natural sciences have to contend, is the wretched habits of study the pupils bring with them from the lower studies. It is the writer's practice to devote considerable time at the begining of these courses, to the formation of correct habits of thought. It can not be done entirley in the class-room. An hour spent with a pupil over a lesson will be of far greater value than a proportional time at the lecture or recitation. They are taught to study with the understanding; to grasp the leading ideas upon which the whole lesson depends; and to bring the whole into a unific form. In the class-room considerable time is given to the making of abstracts, or skeletons of topics, and to the analysis of subjects into their parts. And, finally, the pupils are not allowed to lose sight of the fact that the narrow view of these subjects obtained in a short Normal School course is valuable chiefly as a foundation for future study and reading.-School Bulletin.

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RESULTS OF EDUCATION.

`HE Parliament which sat at Edinburgh passed an act for the establishment

had never seen took place in the moral and intellectual character of the people. Soon, in spite of the rigor of the climate, in spite of the sterility of the earth, Scotland became a country which had no reason to envy the fairest portions of the globe. Wherever the Scotchman went—and there were few parts of the world to which he did not go--he carried his superiority with him. If he was admitted into a public office, he worked his way up to the highest post. If he took employment in a brewery or factory, he was soon the foreman. If he took a shop, his trade was the best in the street. If he enlisted in the army, he became a color-sergeant. If he went to a colony, he was the most thriving planter there. The Scotchman of the seventeenth century had been spoken of in London as we speak of the Esquimaux. The Scotchman of the eighteenth century was an object, not of scorn, but of envy. The cry was that wherever he came he got more than his share; that, mixed with Englishmen, or mixed with Irishmen, he rose to the top as surely as oil rises to the top of water. And what had produced this great revolution? The Scotch air was still as cold; the Scotch rocks were still as bare as ever. All the natural qualities of the Scotchman were still what they had been when learned and benevolent men advised that he should be flogged, like a beast of burden, to his daily task. But the State had given him an education. That education was not, it is true, in all respects what it should have been. But such as it was, it had done more for the bleak and dreary shores of the Forth and the Clyde than the richest of soils and the most genial of climates had done for Capua and Tarentum. Is there one member of this House, however strongly he may hold the doctrine that the Government ought not to interfere with the education of people, who will stand up and say that, in his opinion, the Scotch would now have been a happier and a more enlightened people if they had been left, during the last five generations, to find instruction for themselves?

I say, then, sir, that, if the science of government be an experimental science, this question is decided. We are in a condition to perform the inductive process according to the rules laid down in the Novum Organum. We have two nations closely connected, inhabiting the same island, sprung from the same blood, speaking the same language, governed by the same sovereign and the same Legislature, holding essentially the same religious faith, having the same allies and the same enemies. The opulent and highly civilized nation leaves the education of the people to free competition. In the poor and half barbarous nation, the education of the people is undertaken by the State. The result is that the first are last, and the last are first. The common people of Scotland-it is in vain to disguise the truth-have passed the common people of England. Free competition, tried with every advantage, has produced effects from which, as the Congregational Union tells us, we ought to be ashamed, and which must lower us in the estimation of every intelligent foreigner. State education, tried under disadvantage,