How to Learn Easily/Chapter 1
CHAPTER I
ECONOMY IN STUDY
We must frankly face the fact that it is possible that some students in every class would be more useful to themselves and to the world in a "job", either on the front or back end of a street car; or in a good, substantial position in a machine shop, in a laundry, or in a confectionery store, or something like that. For it is possible, if not probable, that a certain percentage of a class are not at all of a scholarly "make-up", so that they can never be a success at any learned pursuit. The place to discover this is early in school, lest otherwise they waste precious time.
Interest in a Subject.—If students are naturally of a scholarly disposition it is much easier for them to study effectively than otherwise it could be. But whether scholarly or not they must first have a real interest in that which they wish to study. If they have grown up without the "natural scholarly interest", it is their duty to acquire it. But when a real interest has been really acquired, they will learn almost reflexly and without any great effort, because it will be a pleasure to them. So this matter is truly worth while. Furthermore, students must have a continually changing and a continually developing interest. In every case, if they wish to economize time and energy and to learn adequately, they will, as a preliminary, develop an interest in the subject they are studying.
Some, in fact millions,—never go far enough or deep enough to develop an interest never deep enough to realize how unimaginably marvellous is their world of matter and life and mind. This may be "fate" or it may be just laziness.
The best way to develop an interest in any subject is by collateral reading. We should read broadly on subjects allied more or less closely to what we are studying. When it is physiology, for example, we should read about related sciences—physics, psychology, and the enticing histology of the nervous system. There are all sorts of exceedingly interesting material to be obtained from the libraries, which is related to this particular subject, complex and fascinating in itself. Another way to develop interest is by thinking for ourselves of those relations. A third method is to associate with people who already have an interest. Fortunate is the student who can have the advantage of association with masters of the subject in hand! Whatever be the means, we must have interest.
Whatever we have an interest in, we enjoy doing, and that is the reason why well-adapted work, in the long run, is the most certain, if not the greatest, of human delights. Many people think of work as a necessary something, disagreeable rather than agreeable, but, on the contrary, it is certainly one of life's most permanent and substantial satisfactions and delights. Work (more properly called drudgery) that is not adapted to the individual is undeniably unpleasant. Professors in our colleges and universities, for example, rarely grumble about their work, and this is not primarily because their work on the whole is pleasant, but more because it is well adapted to them; for otherwise they give it up. It is the vast body of men who do not as yet have work which is adapted to them, who do not like to work. All great, useful, and original work ordinarily is done under such conditions that the work is enjoyable, there being always enough of interest about it to make it pleasurable. It is under these conditions, furthermore, and generally under these alone, that the largest amount of energy is expended. This basal relationship is expressed in the science of efficiency in the term "Sthen-euphoric Index", meaning the more or less direct ratio between the expenditure of energy in any action and its inherent pleasantness. "Enjoy your work and you will most likely expend a very large amount of energy in it." This is the practical corollary of this fundamental index of organic dynamics.
The writer has published recently[1] a chapter on "The Economics of Happiness", a pioneer discussion of this perhaps sometime important topic, and it is so germane to the task of suggesting the easiest modes of doing mental work that much of this discussion must be repeated here.
The scientific economics of joy and happiness remains to be developed. In other terms, joy has a valuation (even if not yet in figures) in Wall Street on the bulletins of the Stock Exchange; in the factory office; among the maids in your home; in the coal mine; aboard ship; in your own private accounts which you keep to satisfy the income-tax collector. Daily joy has money-value as well as soul value even in the manual trades. And soon some man (or, more likely, perhaps, some ingenious woman economist) will begin to reduce it to grades, to "standardize" it, and to find its mean financial value to all sorts and conditions of workers.
There is an inherent relationship as deep as is conceivable in our human personality between the experience of a satisfaction which merges into plain enjoyment and the activity, fusing into the cараbility, of the body. This relationship is "immanent", as the metaphysicians used to say, in our self-reliance, in our pride of life, extending through the gamut from mere baseless vanity upward to the substantial manhood or womanhood which is certain of its worth and of its powers. The keen and great thinker Spinoza, nearly three centuries ago, put this primal relationship into plain Latin in three successive propositions of his "Ethics" (Part III, Propositions LIII, LIV, and LV), translated by Elwes:
When the mind regards itself and its own power of activity, it feels pleasure and that pleasure is greater in proportion to the distinctness wherewith it conceives itself and its own power of activity. The mind endeavours to conceive only such things as assert its power of activity. When the mind contemplates its own weakness, it feels pain thereat.
This emphasizes one side: that we take delight in our capability and vice versa; the other side, that our powers increase with the agreeableness of the process, it has taken a busy scientific century to demonstrate. Let us turn now to its more practical meaning.
If one compares the larger workshops of to-day with those of a few decades ago, one sees at a glance how much has been done in like direction, but with week-day good health and productive hygiene as the guiding star rather than happiness. It need not be suggested that the two are close relatives, daughters both of the same sound and handsome couple, the Busy Normalities. But happiness may be furthered for her own sake, being quite worth while herself as well as a complement to her hygienic sister.
Workaday joy has economic status, because happiness is strongly dynamogenic, increasing the expenditure of energy in every kind of work. Joyous behavior is more vivacious; and a happy girl in a paper-box factory will probably make at least five per cent more boxes in a day than the same girl, unhappy, can pile up. Moreover, the work done under the stimulus of joy is not only faster but better in every way, for it means an attentive interest in the adjustments, making them more exact.
However considerable the efficiency increase in manual vocations, in those that are commonly termed mental (as if all such were not also neuromuscular as well!) the productive advantage is far greater still. Here speed becomes usually of minor account, the quality being of importance out of proportion to the time required. And happiness urges its own perfection on what it helps create. The practical result of this two-phased principle of creative efficiency, and somewhat in ratio with the psychic freedom of the work, is that forms of art and philosophy and notably creative literature ordinarily are actually dependent more or less on it. The author, at a recent "Shop-talk" of the Boston Authors' Club, made a little more explicit some of this dependence under the title "The Author's Stheneuphoric Index." In part he said:
In its details this close association between happiness, or contentment akin thereto, and the highest creative efficiency is a long and much involved story with complex plot within plot and incidents innumerable, whose scenario its Infinite Author is provokingly slow and hesitant to reveal (on this particular speck of the cosmos at least). My present years are in part employed in an attempt to understand this story whose practical meaning, however we view it, is so impressive. It is just one little phase of the master-knot of human mystery—the relations of the body and the mind, which in its last analysis reduces to the structure and the mode of action of the human nervous system, by all means the magnum opus of Evolution up to our era. The gist of the matter, the grist of this milling, appears to be that fatigue and pain and worry and impatience and real unpleasantness of every kind related to authorship and other creative work are abnormalities which actually diminish the speed and mar the quality of our entire creative efficiency. It is somewhat as if the course and the rate of a trolley car in our present wretched system were actually impaired by the wheels' squeak and the smell of the bad air and the personal repulsion and the jolt and the whole general impiety of the interior atmosphere. And sometimes in very sooth these are so impaired—as from quarrels with the conductor or by withdrawals because of the bad conditions within. Fatigue and unpleasantness of every sort may find their sanctions in the world's last reckoning, for philosophy as well as for religion and theology. But so far as the definite practical economics of a workaday world is concerned, there is little doubt that for the most part organic happiness makes for greatly increased productiveness both in quality and in quantity.
Be not misled by probable personal memories of "forcing yourself to do excellent work when it was most unpleasant", etc., etc. Two ideas seem especially to belie this fallacy: (1) the inexcusable waste of nerve strength necessary to force the association of ideas along the paths which for efficiency should always be, so to say, downhill; (2) even more frequent, perhaps, a confusion of terms, the mistaking and misinterpretation of feelings due to ennui, and lassitude, for a real dysphoria or emotional unpleasantness underlying the action of the nervous system, in short, worry and true fatigue.
In general these last, the contrary of our more or less symbolic "joy," seem to be of practical economic importance in freely creative work. To demonstrate this proposition, however, to set forth scientifically the details of this, the very heart of our matter, would take us into technicalities of physiology and psychology wholly out of place here. And you'll all be jolly well content, as our English cousins say, to avoid the stress and strain, and so merely be assured that such wholly undomesticated and unauthorized creatures as the cortical nerve-cell cytoplasm, internal secretions, blood pressure, and numerous like things underlie what we are slowly learning about this general relationship of unhappiness and unpleasantness to creative inefficiency or incapacity, objectively considered. On the other hand, your own interests it may be, as well as scientific theory, compel me to assure you that the practical fact seems to be substantially as I have said: It is better for your true "efficiency" that you should not do creative work at all at any given time than that you should do it when it is distinctly an unpleasant task, that is, whenever the high quality be the aim. This is true of all highly-skilled work, as Professor W. F. Book has shown. Where quality and progressive efficiency count, it is preëminently true of (new) creative work. But nowhere else certainly than in literary work are materials and methods and results so wholly free, and therefore so wholly subject to the law. Mind and body are one, and language is an integral portion of the human mind, and of the human body which expresses and conditions it.
It is not only a matter, however, of actual capability, but also of wasteless capability. If we would reach our highest and greatest efficiency, do the best for ourselves in the long run and struggle, we must here as elsewhere consider "safety first." To push too hard against fatigue, continued disinclination, or positive unpleasantness, is to be wasteful of the best we have, or can have, as creators. And there's never any excuse for waste, anywhere, under any conditions, but, least of all, of a waste of our nerve force, of our vital energy, which goes apace but does not readily return.
The painters and sculptors and the musicians long have realized and practised this principle as a necessary condition of their best creative work. Let the painters teach you, then, their easily-learned lesson! those of you who have not already found this broad but (for once) straight road for yourselves.
When the different phases of creative work shall have been studied along this general method, but with actual experimental data and mathematical results, then at length the economics of happiness will have been written in part. Herbert Spencer, Bain, Münsterberg, Grant Allen, H. R. Marshall, Max Meyer, Harvey, and numerous others already have taken this matter a little way along its physiologic road, far beyond Jeremy Bentham and the Utilitarianism of Mill. But in spite of these, which are, as it were, the steam engines and the electric motors of transportation, the true ultimate internal-combustion engine which will carry us along in contentment to the goal of hedonistic economics, although invented, is yet to be employed. Along this splendid roadway one speeds at will, and the ride, although a ride of joy, results for a certainty in no disaster.
Nearly every word of this brief account of the joy-efficiency ratio is applicable to the learning process. We learn fastest when we enjoy our study. We learn only at great extravagance of effort and of emotion when method or teacher or other conditions makes the subject and its mastery hateful or consistently annoying. How important in practice in the minds of thousands and thousands of our brightest grammar and high school children is this certain relationship! The sthen-euphoric index certainly needs both theoretical discussion and practical application in its relation to all our schools.[2]
After having acquired a good interest and understood the relations between it, enjoyment, initiative, and energy, the learning process proper may be considered next. There are two kinds of learning as a procedure, one of which is a conscious process, conscious, deliberate study; while the second is another mode of learning, of which many are not even aware, namely, subconscious learning—by observation and association, more or less unconscious.
Conscious or Deliberate Study.—When we think of study, most of us consider only conscious, deliberate study, reading, or "grinding", usually in some book or other. This process is essentially a checking or restraining process, that which we call in physiology and in psychology "inhibition", an incentive of some sort to check some active process by a normal influence. The process of conscious study is one of an inhibitory nature—in its ultimate analysis the essence of humanity and of its civilization and culture.
In the first place we have to inhibit fatigue when we "grind." We are tired and would like to go to bed, or to go outside for a walk, or to some place of amusement that is restful. Theoretically there should be no fatigue. Work should be so arranged, alternating with rest and exercise and eating, that there should be no appreciable and depressing fatigue. This inhibition seeks a more pleasant occupation. Billy calls around to play "old maid" or something or other; or Cousin Susie wants us to go to the movies. Then there are many distractions which have to be inhibited; the reckless automobiles or carting on the avenue, cats on the back fence, a piano-torture from the next room, or someone beyond all humanity trying to play on the violin. All sorts of sensory stimuli have to be kept out of the effective mind. The desire to change must be inhibited, the perfectly normal tendency to change occupation and thus get rested.
Study, then, so far as deliberate, is the forcing of the mental processes along new pathways, the forcing of nerve-impulses through groups of perhaps thousands of neurones where they have not been exactly before. When interest is acquired and other things are right and we are in good physiological condition, it is a real pleasure truly to grind. The habit of even this kind of study is easily acquired, much more easily in most of us than we think. The habit of inhibitory, forceful grinding on difficult study-subjects is soon acquired if we give ourselves a fair chance to acquire it; and knowledge and understanding will represent the comfort of our wives and children, for the two will be largely our earning capital.
We should beware of false study, dozing: trying to hold the eyes open while the brain is shut tight. In such cases the brain is not open, for the sensory paths and the association paths are closed. If we cannot force an interest or attention on what we are studying, we should rest entirely for a few minutes or else open the windows, stir about, and force the issue. Or, if conditions are such that we cannot possibly give our attention to the subject in hand, as may happen readily in fatigue, we should give it up. Unless we can give our whole attention to whatever we are studying, it is of little or no account to us, and much worse than that, it gets us into the bad habit of sitting with a book before us and pretending to ourselves that we are studying when, in reality, the brain-neurones are not getting hold of the facts at all. The loss of a little time is of no account compared with the misfortune of this habit.
There should be no rote-learning. There are extremely few things that are properly learned by rote, and it is well to avoid attempting to learn in this way. In the long run it is a great waste. No lecturer or quiz-master who knows his pedagogical business will give out his material or opinions so that a student can take them down in the form of formulæ and "run it in" on an examination or elsewhere. A lecture should be, almost always, explanation and not description; lectures are properly complementary to texts. Facts and principles should be learned by concept, not by word.
There are certain physiological requisites for study, especially five things of a hygienic physiological nature which must be mentioned: (1) good health, (2) abundant outdoor muscular exercise, (3) abundant natural air, (4) abundant proper food, and (5) abundant sleep.
It is necessary for a student to have good health, else he is inexcusably wasteful. We cannot possibly study, for example, with eye-strain, for this inflicts a continuous strain on the brain and on the whole nervous system, which depresses the vigor of the mental action. Students should not think of studying when they have a headache, for at such a time the brain is congested with blood. Under such circumstances it would be more economical to take a brisk, erect, longish walk out-of-doors, or to do almost anything except study. For a like reason, we should not try to study when we are ill, say with a bad cold in the head even, a mild influenza, or anything of that sort. Some try to study when they are at home "sick", which is absurd, unless it is a broken leg or something of that non-neural nature. It is very necessary that a successful student should be free from worry.[3] We should not stay a student and allow ourselves to worry about the family skeleton, illness in the home, or other things, even though they be of such real importance. If worrying interferes with the business of studying, we should either give up worrying or postpone the business, for certainly we cannot do both at the same time. In some cases, study can be made to force the worry out of the head; if so, it is well.
We should take abundant gross muscular exercise. The reason for this is that exercise stimulates the circulation, and "keeps the cobwebs out of the brain", the spinal cord, and other important nerve-masses. Muscles, as well as brains, are used in thinking, and they don't work so well when they are flabby and out of tone, and poorly supplied with oxygen and clogged with carbon dioxide. Too much exercise, on the other hand, must be avoided, since it employs the brain and so tires it beyond use for study.
Abundant natural outdoor Air.—It is not necessary to study out-of-doors, as we can have plenty of outdoor air indoors by the simple expedient of opening the windows. Air of the proper temperature and proper humidity is essential. Moving air, properly moist and properly cool (68° F.), is the ideal.[4]
We should have abundant food, but not too much. The ideal is food that is easily digestible and taken often. Four moderate meals a day taken regularly, is far better for a student than two overlarge. Coffee may be taken if necessary for successful study. There are many authors who do good and abundant creative work under the influence of tea or of coffee, essentially alike in their stimulant action. Alcohol is a poisonous depressant and not a stimulant at all, save indirectly on the heart.
Students, to be efficient, must have abundant sleep. Ten hours is little too much. There must be no study within an hour, at least, after eating. On the other hand, gentle ambulatory exercise helps digestion. It is certain that if the blood is doing its work in the stomach, enough of it cannot be at the same time in the brain, and the brain cannot work without its normal abundance of blood. So that it is quite absurd to think of studying to good advantage immediately after a hearty meal. It is considered by many a good thing to take cat-naps at times through the day. Food digests best of all when we are asleep. We should not try to carry on our work on the boa-constrictor plan of taking one big meal every half-year and then going to sleep for the next six months! The boa-constrictor is a really poor student. Ten hours sleep is none too much, and cat-naps certainly are excellent, for a short nap, even of five or ten minutes, gives a large amount of cerebral rest; for even a five-minute nap takes the blood for a moment out of the brain, stirs up things there generally, and makes us ready for a good siege of study. Professor William James and, more recently, Professor C. E. Seashore, of the University of Iowa, have called attention to the real importance of this matter, corroborated, as it is, by well-known principles of elementary physiology and by the psychology of efficiency.
Professor James, in his extremely important "Talks to Teachers," writes as follows:—
"We have lately had a number of accomplished Hindoo visitors at Cambridge, who talk freely of life and philosophy. More than one of them has confided to me that the sight of our faces, all contracted as they are with the habitual American over-intensity and anxiety of expression, and our ungraceful and distorted attitudes, in sitting, made on him a very painful impression. 'I do not see', said one, 'how it is possible for you to live as you do without a single minute in your day deliberately given to tranquillity and meditation. It is an invaluable part of our Hindoo life to retire for at least half an hour daily into silence, to relax our muscles, govern our breathing, and meditate on eternal things. Every Hindoo child is trained to this from a very early age.' The good fruits of such discipline were obvious in the physical repose, and lack of tension, and the wonderful smoothness and calmness of facial expression, and imperturbability of manner in these Orientals. I felt that my countrymen were depriving themselves of an essential grace of character. How many American children ever hear it said by parent or teacher that they should moderate their piercing voices, that they should relax their unused muscles, and, as far as possible, when sitting, sit quite still? Not one in a thousand, not one in five thousand. Yet from this reflex influence on the inner mental states, this early over-tension, over-motion, and over-expression are working us grievous national harm."
Professor Seashore adds to this highly significant advice a suggestion which makes our point of view on the matter still more nearly complete. Не says:—
"The feature which concerns us (in regard to the midday nap) is that the greatest benefit from normal sleep, night or day, comes from the very first part of it. From this we may derive a principle of mental economy. Cut short the long, light sleep of the late morning hours and substitute a short sleep at some favorable time during the work-day. Fifteen minutes of sleep after the heaviest work and the main meal of the day will count more for efficiency than five times fifteen minutes of sleep in the morning. The curve of day-sleep has the same form as the curve of night-sleep; but it is usually very much smaller. From ten to twenty minutes would cover the period of deepest sleep in the day rest of a normal brain-worker."
Attention to a book should not be too long concentrated, without pause. It should by habit be concentrated vigorously, but only for relatively short periods at a time. The most useful periods of work when the mental effort is expended in associating numbers with letters (simple, for the purposes of the laboratory) have been studied by Professor Daniel Starch, of the University of Wisconsin. He says that in this work "it is more economical, within limits, to shorten the periods of work and to distribute them correspondingly over a given period of time. The most favorable length of period for this work seemed to be between ten and twenty minutes." It is well, if we are to rely implicitly on opinions as rules of behavior, to have in evidence the figures of actual experimentation.
There should be more power of concentration for short periods than most schools inculcate, but we cannot keep the mind strongly concentrated for long periods under ordinary degrees of educational interest. Every twenty minutes or so a student should walk around the room for a minute or two, for this activity draws some of the blood out of the brain into the legs; moreover, it relieves the injurious long-fixation of the eyes. No one can sit for an hour, or an hour-and-a-half, without changing his position, except at a considerable loss of nerve-economy. Under such a condition it is naturally difficult to avoid going to sleep, partial or complete.
Grammar schools and high schools almost never, as yet, succeed in teaching their students how to think, and still that is what counts most. A momentary, thoughtful idea often is worth a week of fruitless mechanical grind. Quality not quantity is what counts in study as well as in other things. When we study we should make a serious business of it, remembering that real learning, that is understanding and constructive power, comes only through thought.
Subsconscious Learning.—This is a mode of learning which one unfamiliar with psychology is not apt to think of as "study" at all. We acquire this kind of learning (both as process and as product) with the subconscious minds, physiologically chiefly, namely by the association of millions of neurones. Subconscious observation by subconscious minds would be a common way to characterize it.
A good example of this kind of study or learning is a child about two years old learning to speak. The child, at first, does not consciously strive to pick up the marvellous art of speaking, but none the less he acquires it quickly, in part by imitation. We cannot understand anything worth learning without this factor of mind, the subsconscious mind, the great integrator of intelligence. The endless details of knowledge are supplied very largely by this unconscious mental process, this continual subconscious perception and observation by all the senses at once.
It is beyond our present purpose to describe this phase of the human mind, that deep and on-rushing part of "the stream of consciousness", which is closest to the nervous integrators of protoplasmic function. It is the great planner of our behavior, however, the chief solver of our most important problems in the conduct of life; it is the seat of our motives, the developer of our habits, the associator of our ideas into real and useful knowledge. I recommend it for study, that we may understand our own selves and the minds of those about us. Von Hartmann, Dubois, H. Poincaré, Morton Prince, Ribot, Coriat, Jelliffe, and Janet, teach about it, all that we need to know, until we learn to observe its phenomena first hand for ourselves.
At present we are concerned with the subconscious as the chief active recipient of information from the environment and as the chief arranger, developer, and increaser of this ever-varying multitude of educational impressions. As has been said already, without the subsconscious there could be no real understanding of actual conditions of experience, so myriad are they and so complex and interinvolved.
We should keep all our senses open, therefore, to "light" of every kind imaginable, which the subconscious integrating process may relate to each other and to ourselves, and make us truly wise.
There are three chief ways of studying in this process of school and college learning. In the first place, by more or less conscious seeing and observing of books, diagrams, pictures, and other things that we can get only through our sense of vision. Second, hearing things such as lectures, recitations, and talk. And third, by actually actively doing things—extensive laboratory work, clinical work, and, to a less extent, essay-work, constructive drawing, research. To discuss these in detail here is out of the question, so that we must be content with the mere observation, although of basal and vast importance, that doing, as opposed to receiving, represents the modern method of learning even the most abstract of subjects. The world is becoming aware, and effectively aware, that bodily efficiency one way or another is the basis of learning, or, in the words of wise old Pestalozzi, "No learning without skill."
Imagination is essential in every scientific man who is more than a manikin. But visualizing imagination is of immediate necessity to every student. We must, for example, be able to look, in our minds, directly into any part of a living organism and accurately see just what there is and precisely what is going on there. The lack of this power, I am convinced, is the cause of the inefficiency of many engineers, geologists, physicians. Anatomy, for example, or physiology, pathology, surgery, clinical medicine are but impractical knowledge without this faculty, easily developed (by most students) by a little practice. I recommend it as an important accomplishment in itself, as well as a valuable means of study.
The taking of notes is of sufficient practical importance to warrant a brief discussion. If text-books are the meat of the student, his notes are certainly his necessary drink, with his meals and at other times. It has been said that one "should train his powers of observation and memory" so as to be able to go into a lecture-room and remember the gist of the lecture without taking notes. But in the first place, we cannot develop our memory.[5] We should not attempt to accustom ourselves to listening to lectures without taking at least a few notes, unless the subject be untechnical. Every school lecture contains many material facts, and sometimes hundreds of them, and there is no mind that can remember them all, economically. No matter how vital and permanent they may seem the moment when we hear them, they probably are soon replaced with others equally interesting, and very soon most of them are gone, many of them for good, while part of those which remain are jumbled and mistaken.
We should take notes of everything worth noting. No matter where we are, whenever we hear anything, or even see anything worth noting, we should "make a note of it." These notes will be of value all our lives, the most vital links of our mind with our precious school-life; and often of great practical use, besides.
Notes should be arranged schematically in a psychologically scientific way, with center headings, side headings, group headings, and sub-group headings, and put down according to ideas under such headings. When all run together, notes are not of much use. Let a book's elaborate analytical table of contents be a model for this. We should get into the habit of using abbreviations. Shorthand is desirable, economical, and almost necessary, but if we cannot manage to learn shorthand, we can acquire a system of abbreviation of our own device. Do not expect to get from a lecture anything that can be taken down and run in verbatim on an examination, for a good lecture is an explanation, not dictation; not a description; and not a set of crib-notes.
It is extremely important to economy that notes be kept "posted up" every day, if not in our notebooks, then in our brains. We should go over them in general every night and thus connect them with what has gone before, and so keep the mind up with the subject. Examinations will take care of themselves if we keep our didactic material posted up day after day. Examinations are not intended to trap us, but are intended as means to find out how much we know or do not know; mostly, in fact, how much we do not know. Cramming for an examination is like carrying weights in our pockets when getting weighed: we are cheating ourselves. The economical way is to keep our notes posted up in our brains every day; so they can associate and we can learn much faster, giving our subconscious faculties a better chance. The power of grasping ideas is an extremely valuable one. We should pick out the gist and sense of a running discourse, select the ideas, and express them in our own words.
The drawing and writing of diagrams is of the greatest importance, and all put before us should be sketched quickly. The drawing of original diagrams is of much value, but the quick copying of those put before us is also very important. Things should not "go in one ear and out the other": there should be something within, between the ears, to fix the ideas, namely, the brains. One easy way to do that is by writing tersely the ideas, and drawing the diagrams whenever possible. We should learn to visualize, to see and hear and feel things in our minds, and this selection of the essentials will help this important habit.
Frequent reviewing is of the greatest importance. It tends to integrate things, keeps subjects unified, and puts the whole subject before us at once. Without a wholeness nothing is of much account.
We should have as large a variety of textbooks on every subject we study as we can possibly afford, for, in that way, we get different points of view of the same topic, and fixation is more certain. Every ten dollars paid for good books while students, will be worth a hundred dollars to us later on. And no wise person sells his old text-books, for each one has associations with his mind which make it often far more valuable and convenient to him in later years than a new one could be.
Conversation and discussion among ourselves are extremely important as means to accurate and broad information. Talk things over. Collateral reading always lends interest, and makes us better talkers, which in itself is well worth while in any man or woman.
The need for economy in learning, economy in time and energy, has long been recognized as a pressing need of the utmost economic and social import. No one, perhaps, has better stated this aspect of the question than has President Suzzallo, of the University of Washington, in the Report of the National Council of Education on "Economy of Time in Education" (Bulletin 38, U. S. Bureau of Education). He writes:—
"More efficient and economical methods must be used, if the general schools are to be relieved of overpressure. The waste in our schools for general training has been apparent. It will become more irritating, once we attempt to shorten the period of education by two full years. It will be doubly vexatious when we dare to add the new aspects of human training that modern society requires. Perhaps just this additional pressure is necessary to make us urgent in the improvement of our educational methods. Then, perhaps, we shall recognize that a cultural education must be measured by standards of practicality, less obvious but just as certain, as those which obtain in preparation for bread-winning. Who that is not superficial can doubt the practicality of a good character as a business asset? Who will not recognize the worth of a common stock of moral ideals, when two classes in the community wage unfair war upon each other? It must be our business to try to analyze more accurately than we have ever done the spiritual practicality of our general schools. Only then can we weed out our false practices and our ineffective instruction. It will be difficult to do, but it can be done, if we will only study men in the setting of a real social world. From the standpoint of the philosophy of education, there are three clear ways by which we can decrease the overpressure in our schools:
"(1) We must rid ourselves once and for all of that fallacy which insinuates that education is to be completed for any person within a given set of schools. A broad view of life tells us it is experience which educates. We are made by the whole length and breadth of life. Other institutions than the school do mold the pupil's character; life beyond the school will continue to amend it. The school simply occupies a strategic position in human life because it works upon a plastic infancy with tools that are of very superior power, if rightly applied. But the fact need not suggest that the school must complete any man's education. More than anything else teachers require the courage to leave things undone. To make that possible, the teacher must not be content to teach students all the facts they need to know finally. The school can not do it anyway. It should take the focus of its attention off facts and forms perfectly learned and habits and attitudes completely fixed, and divide its attention between (a) requiring a thorough acquisition of some fundamental things and (b) developing interests in the unmastered domains, along with the power to attack these fields when the grown man faces them in his adult life. The first economy in our education will come through a completely changed point of view as to the school's function. It will take the emphasis off subject matter as an end, making it a means, and lay the stress upon the development of the child's power to proceed alone. What does it matter that a child does not know everything, if the school will make him wish to do so and give him the power of independent thought and study? Six years of school life are merely six years of opportunity to grow in knowledge and power. Let the school do what it can in the allotted time, always remembering that the child must be equipped to go on without the teacher.
"An incalculable waste occurs in our schools because this principle is violated. Fearful that the course will not be covered, that some fact will be left out, we hurry, crowd, and coerce children till they have no further interest in books when school is done. We have taught them many facts superficially, but we have shorn them of the power to educate themselves. Children who have been in the presence of good literature for years never seek it again, because the teacher has maltreated both the subject and the children with his pedantic insistence on details. They acquire no more facts when school is done, because they have not been taught to work in freedom, without the admonitions and compulsions of the teacher. We must aim to do more for human power, by striving to do less in the way of giving students information.
"(2) We must reconstruct the course of study so as to eliminate that which does not need to be known, or that which is of lesser importance and can be gained by the student after a while. No mere professional theory of discipline should be allowed to take precedence over real social need. The curricula of our schools must be made in the light of our social surveys of what men need in knowledge, habits, powers, skills, and values. And these surveys need to be made accurately. If the vocabulary taught in spelling contains 3000 words, these should be the 3000 words most frequently used in the social world, not some mere compilation made on the guess of textbook makers. If his mathematical computations are taught him, they should correspond in fact and method with current adult practice. The selection of a course of study is always primarily a sociological matter; and every activity, traditional or innovative, should be eliminated when no relatively important social sanction can be found for it. All truth is useful, but in a few school years all truth cannot be mastered; what is less important must be dropped if a more important element calls for its time.
"(3) We must increase the efficiency of our methods of instruction. We are still divided into cults, as to teaching processes. If we like the old, we stick to a traditional procedure; if we are temperamentally fond of the new, we welcome innovation. We do not know the relative efficiency of an old as opposed to a new method; of a method used in one locality as compared with another employed in other school systems. We must as a profession eliminate the less efficient modes of instruction (a) by subjecting all our classroom procedure to the test of a comparative experimental pedagogy and (b) by establishing some central bureau of pedagogical knowledge which will keep the professional world informed as to methods and their values.
"The waste in education will not be difficult once we have (1) attained a more natural view of the school's functions, (2) provided social surveys as a basis for constructing courses of study, and (3) established an experimental pedagogy for determining relative efficiency."
Education as well as being a theoretically precious and a thoroughly practical thing, is in fact also a good financial investment. Some one has suggested that the uneducated man earns about $1.50 per day, or $20,000 in forty years; a high-school graduate about $1000 a year, or $40,000 in forty years; a college-man earns on an average say about $3000 per year, or $120,000 in forty years, when an average amount of work is done. The difference between the first and second is $20,000, but the difference between the second and the third, between the earnings of the high school and the college graduates, is $80,000. That is a whole fortune in itself. These statements point out practically and explicitly the material value of an education to those numerous people who for the most part measure all things in terms of dollars and cents,—certainly the most general measurement-unit which we possess.
Huxley's definition of a liberal education is as follows:—
"That man, I think, has had a liberal education who has been so trained in youth that his body is the ready servant of his will, and does with ease and pleasure all the work that, as a mechanism, it is capable of; whose intellect is a clear, cold logical engine, with all its parts of equal strength, and in smooth working order, ready, like a steam engine, to be turned to any kind of work and spin the gossamers as well as forge the anchors of the mind; whose mind is stored with a knowledge of the great and fundamental truths of Nature and of the laws of her operations; one who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to come to a halt by a vigorous will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of Nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to love others as himself. Such a one and no other has had a liberal education."
"Our conscious thoughts are much more determined by subconscious processes, of which we are unaware, than we realize. One great popular delusion is that our minds are more exact logical instruments than they really are, and we stand in awe of the minds of great men, thinking that because they are superior in certain directions therefore they are superior in all other directions of their activities, where they claim superiority. Whereas, as a matter of fact, a man may be eminently superior in certain fields of mental activity and psychologically a perfect fool-thinker and fool-performer in other fields. Helmholtz said of the eye that it was such an imperfect optical instrument that if an instrument-maker should send him an optical instrument so badly made, he would refuse to accept it and return it forthwith. He might have said the same thing of the human mind. It is a very imperfect instrument of thought. All we can say is that it is the best we can get. The deeper insight we get into the mechanism of the human mind the poorer thing it appears as an instrument of precision."
It is only man's instinctive egotism, on the one hand, uncorrected by his relative ignorance, on the other, that has kept this, the obviously correct scientific attitude, from long since becoming common wisdom. One who knows he has to work with poor tools will see all the more occasion and necessity for all the information and hints he can obtain, and will see the need also for the exercise both of the greatest diligence and the greatest care in using the tools he has. It is well always to realize that the body and the mind (in its scientific sense) educationally speaking are tools, tools none too efficient, which have to be trained laboriously into high ability. The mind, then, is in general a capable instrument but not particularly so as an instrument of precision.
It is well worth while for every student to be economical in the use of time, to learn in the most economical manner that he can employ. That is my chief sanction for offering as really important certain hints on the more economical methods of study and of learning—and of becoming wise!
We do not need here to discuss at all the nature of education. But I do suggest that a familiar and short definition of the essence of human education is the adequate reaction of personality to its environment. The "reaction" in this definition is for our immediate practical purpose the important thing.
We must remember, however, that the learning-process is not a material process. A teacher cannot give us a knowledge of literature, of geometry, of physics, or of similar subjects, as he might readily convey the detailed directions for doing fine presswork, or for building a complete doll's house, or for the construction of a fancy chocolate cake. The two problems are distinctly different. The best that one can do in giving advice on such a matter as learning—so subtle and at times seemingly so wholly abstract—is to state, as simply as possible, the chief effective conditions involved and then to trust implicitly in the natural reaction of the learner's mind on the information secured.
Indispensable, certainly, for learning worthy of its high reputation, is the consistent, deeply seated will-to-learn. One must firmly impress his motivation-force and set it in permanent action, fully determined to support it in every respect. From the first in normal children the desire to learn is strong and may be relied upon. Professor Hall-Quest of the University of Virginia expressed much in an address in Richmond in November, 1915 ("School and Society", March 11, 1916), especially in the following two paragraphs:—
"Any one who has observed children knows that they are bundles of question marks. They are also mimics by nature. Curiosity and imitation in various combinations and levels of development are the sine qua non of learning. The harmonious and concentrated exercise of the attention upon a difficult task may be called the will to learn. It is the coöperation of the entire personality of one's being upon a task. The child may be restless for many reasons, but it does possess the will to learn in proportion to its interest in the undertaking. The interests of the child, as we know, are closely related to the instincts. The problem of education is partly the selection of those methods of teaching that stimulate instinctive interests to the discipline of habit formation. If a child, in all respects apparently normal, seems to lack interest in kindergarten and school work this condition is due to one of two causes; either the natural interest of the child has not been appealed to with sufficient "punch" or the child is physically ill. Normal children want to learn. The plasticity, the resilience of the nervous system is wholly in favor of new impressions. The capacity of the young child for work is marvellous. Between its physical and mental activities there is a close correlation providing adequate measures are employed to arouse and keep awake the mind. Otherwise one meets the all too common results obtained by the Simon-Binet tests, children physically normal but mentally several years behind the chronological age.
"The importance of all this for the kindergarten teacher is obvious. There is need of beginning very early to teach the child the rudiments of reading, writing and the simplest processes of number work. It is true, as Fiske writes, that the period of human infancy is much longer than that of other forms of animal life because the purpose is so much higher and the results so much more significant for the race. But this should not mean that the period should be unnecessarily prolonged by delaying the introduction of subjects within the range of the child's capacity. The argument usually presented is that it is unfair to the child to force its mind too early. The fact is, however, that it is more unfair to force the child's mind to remain inactive too long. In the reorganization of the school programs up and down it is within the range of conservative prediction to state that within the next decade there will be a successful effort made beyond that now current, to introduce the child much earlier to subjects that are now delayed because the child is supposed to be mentally unable to grasp them as yet. It is fundamentally a matter of method, not mental responsiveness. Boris Sidis' son and others like him have been called precocious. The fact is that they are fascinatingly normal. By a careful study of the child's abilities in the kindergarten it will be possible to determine to what extent its range of education should be enlarged. It will be found that when properly attacked the problems of reading, writing, number work, and those astonishing feats of the imagination leading up to choice bits of thinking form a firm foundation for the gradual supplying of information and for the gradual unfolding of powers that even in these days of enlightenment many parents and teachers believe far beyond the capacity of a child of four or five."
This dynamic aspect of mind, the resistless impulse to do and thereby to "learn", especially in youth, is the very key-note of modern pedagogy—as it is, in sooth, of modern psychology. The practical problem for every student young or old is the manner of best taking advantage of and utilizing this tremendous inherent dynamic tendency.
The precise process cannot, indeed, be described mechanically, for this will-to-learn must do its own work, secure its own personal victories over ignorance and inadequacy. In other words, the student, whatever in all the intricate world of knowledge be his subject, must have a real and lasting desire to learn. Often this alone is enough—the native ingenuity of the learner's intelligence supplies the rest automatically, as biography shows us it has so often done. But many people who can swim really well use bridges even over narrow streams.
Now some of my readers may expect too much from my discussions. Some may mistake advice for energy, a dietary for a full diet, or, even, (in the words of someone else) the guide-board for a rapid and easy intelligent limousine. Just as eternal vigilance is almost always the price of safety, so continual effort is the least cost of an education, of effective learning. That is why an education is worth something, and in many directions too. I wonder if that relationship between this difficulty and the value ever occurred to many who read these words. Ambition and energy, initiative, push, work and effort (but never drudgery) are required for learning, whether hard or easy, for although the study-process is a most pleasant kind of work, almost never drudgery, it requires effort, because it is an active reaction. We have to do it ourselves.
Learning, again, as we often hear, but none too often yet, is not the mere filling of a barrel with apples, but the slow growing up of both the barrel and the apples from the seedling trees. But we may note that out of the five or six million people in the United States who cannot read or write, some have never seen the "guide-board", and do not know even where or how they wish to go! These certainly would not wish to be whisked along blindly in a limousine; nor should we, for in this case it's the journey that counts, not the mere arrival. Education is a progress, not a town with numerous gravestones on every hand. With an ever and ever widening vista, further and further on into the mental depths of Reason and Reality, the Cosmos of spirit and of matter opens to the serious student and to the persistent thinker. And as he dies, be it a good old age or earlier, whatsoever has befallen him or his in an adventurous Life, he realizes that he has had the Very Best this Splendid World Affords.
- ↑ "The Influence of Joy." Little, Brown, and Company. Boston.
- ↑ See also the writer's "The Sthenic Index in Education", Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1912.
- ↑ See, for the therapeutics of worry and nerve-waste in general, a monograph called "Nerve-Waste", Health Education League Booklet, No. 27, Boston, second edition, 1914.
- ↑ For a discussion of the need of moving air and of other hygienic conditions, see the writer's "Certain Further Factors in the Physiology of Euphoria", Psychological Review, May, 1914.
- ↑ For a brief account of memory see the author's article in the Reference Handbook of the Medical Sciences, third edition, 1916, volume six.