A Rational Lesson. Part II.
by S. De Brath.
Volume 8, 1897/8, pgs. 176-184
[Stanley De Brath, 1854-1937, was a civil engineer and psychical researcher. He spent time in India, where he was friends with Rudyard Kipling, and he translated many works from French into English. He and his wife Priscilla had three children.]
(Continued from pg. 125.)
Professor [George Trumbull] Ladd, of Yale University, in his admirable little Primer of Psychology, dedicated to the young daughter of his friend and colleague who, he tells us "has been kind enough to read it and to say that she has understood and enjoyed it," gives in this book, perhaps the brightest and most readable sketch of a complex subject, a tale illustrating the formation of a chain of ideas started by seeing in the distance, recognizing, meeting, and addressing a person on the road. "This narrative," he says, "plainly implies what the examination of all experience proves--namely, that the different forms of experience (such as attention, remembering, perceiving, etc.) depend on each other. The story as it was just told, showed how the feeling of interest awakened and fixed the attention; and how attention influenced the growth of perception. For if we had not been interested and attentive, we should probably have passed the person by without recognizing him. The story also showed how to notice likenesses and unlikenesses, and that to imagine, to remember, and to think, are necessary in order to perceive things with a full recognition. It also showed how feelings of interest and of expectation, and the like, influence perceptions and thoughts; and how, in turn, perceptions, memories, and thoughts influence the feelings. And, finally, feelings were seen to lead to plans and choices."
Here in a nutshell are shown the materials of psychology, a train of ideation leading up to a plan, or a choice between courses of action. The purpose of thought is action, immediate or remote, and what that action will be depends (a) on the nature of the agent, and (b) on his perception of external conditions. Right action comes from more or less complete realization of the actual conditions by an honest mind. It would be impossible here to show how completely a true realization needs the unperverted and healthily exercised faculties, trained to the habit of seeing clearly quite irrespective of the personal wishes, as a true reflection is only to be obtained in an unwarped mirror. Nor is it needed, for we all know that this is the special and glorious prerogative of childhood; so far as a child is curious at all, it only cares to know truth. It has no pre-possessions, the time of passion which warps the perception and perverts the judgment is not yet, and He who placed a little child in the midst, and told His hearers that its unbiased receptivity is the true teachable spirit by which alone can men enter into that realization of truth, which is the gate of the Kingdom of Heaven, was emphasizing a fact with which all teachers should be familiar. We have in the child, not the blank paper, nor the plastic wax, but a growing soul which looks out on its surroundings with an eager desire to know exactly what they are. The honest mind, which is the first requisite to right thought is there, looking out of some twenty pair of clear eyes fronting the teacher, whose task is to lead it to the habit of clear realization of conditions by going through the process day by day; one of the gravest and most responsible trusts that can be laid on man or woman.
This process is a definite sequence whose outlines have been given, a process which always begins in the sense. Sight, hearing, touch, taste, or smell--any or all of these convey impressions to the brain, allied ideas are remembered, and these in their turn are recombined to form the new idea or concept. That is to say that all concepts are based on present or past sense perception, either singly or in conjunction; there is no third way, a truth which has been summed up in the Cartesian aphorism,--Nihil in intellectu nisi prius in sensu. [There is nothing in the intellect that was not previously in the senses.]
These things may be exemplified by almost any act of daily life. To continue Professor Ladd's illustration. As our acquaintance approaches, we note figure and gait, features and traits, which are varieties of form and colour; he speaks, our hearing is appealed to, and so on; each sensorial percept arousing appropriate ideas. This is the normal process of the mind, and this it is which is to be aroused by the first, or Preparation stage of our Rational Lesson. In the present case, the approaching person has another with him to whom he will introduce us, and who in due time will enter into our circle of friends. The Preparation has introduced the matter in hand and aroused the interest and the self-activity, but for this process to be effective, it is needful that every single word of the Preparation be fully understood, and that the mind be entirely familiar with those simple percepts and concepts which are the raw material for complex ones. A child's early lessons should have made it familiar with varieties of colour, transparency, translucency, opaqueness; with accurate descriptions of simple forms, the sphere, the cylinder, the cube, the rectangle, the polygon, the circle, the line; with saltness, sourness, bitterness; with hardness and its measurement, toughness, stiffness, elasticity; with fusion and solution; with length, area, mass, volume, and how they are measured; also with the ordinary qualities whereby different kinds of matter are discriminated from one another and naturally classed in the mind. The simpler properties of common substances, such as water, should also be familiar--that it dissolves many solids more or less, that it vaporises, condenses, freezes into crystals, transmits pressure, &c., &c. That these and kindred simple ideas which underlie so much of our thought are generally picked up haphazard and without accuracy, which accounts for not a little of that habit of loose thinking which is so early acquired and so long retained.* At the stage of growth when our Rational Lesson is supposed to be given, all these primary ideas are supposed to be already existent in the mind and available for illustration of the particular truth or fact which is now to be presented.
* Another is the failure to recognise Causation. Here will be seen a mother who has suffered acutely in her tendered relations from the self-indulgence of her husband, and knows that her pain is due to his habit of never checking his impulses. Nevertheless, having a greedy little son, she fosters this same habit of sensual indulgence, giving him sweets out of meal-times, filling his box with "tuck," to be gorged more or less secretly at school in play-hours; and then when the sensualism she has encouraged takes other forms in later life, forms which her special code regards as terribly reprehensible, she is beyond measure astonished at a result which she never for a moment thinks of as due to her own acts. On this point see an excellent little book called "Mothers and Son," by Canon [Edward] Lyttelton, Headmaster of Haileybury.
This Presentation is the body of the lesson. The previous stage has aroused expectation and linked on the new to the old; we have now to give the new concept, which, it was agreed, must be either (a) a truth, or (b) a mind-picture. It has been already shown that either of these must be formed from present or past sense impressions, and there can be no question that the present ones are much the more vivid. Where, as in history lessons, we are compelled to forego the contact with actual things, we must strive to make up the deficiency as much as possible by the use of map, chart and lantern to make the relations of space, time and form as clear as possible.
Keeping this in mind it will be found that the available means of Presentation are four in number--
(1) Direct appeal to the sense by showing the actual thing--such as the standards of length, mass or weight, with their parts and multiples, in Arithmetic; the plant itself in a Botany lesson; the kinds of soils in Geology; actual watersheds and valleys in Geography (if possible), &c.
(2) Well-chosen experiment which illustrates just the one thing which the teacher has to impress. I saw well-chosen, for if the teacher is not at once perfectly clear in his own mind as to what he wants to express, and also perfectly able to express it as a simple logical conclusion, he will inevitably fail, for his hearers are logical enough, though they never heard of logic nor any "rhetorician's rules, which teach him but to name his tools." Experiment, then, must be (a) simple, (b) direct, proving nothing but the point, and (c) involving nothing not already familiar. Given these conditions, there is no better mode of presentation; it fixes the attention, encourages accurate observation, and the habit of reasoning.
(3) The third kind of presentation is the narrative, including the pictorial. Narrative attempts to recombine the primary humanistic ideas which are expressed by such words as king, priest, clan, tribe, soldier, sailor, ship, war, raid, church, trade, and so forth, and these primary ideas are here presupposed, just as the primary physical ideas were presupposed. As a matter of fact, examination of an ordinary class of boys of thirteen will usually show a very great lack of these ideas without which the more complex ones are unintelligible. But granted their presence, historical teaching mainly proceeds by their recombination, Good narrative describes and gives mind-pictures as it goes on, and groups these into the sequences which make history. Clearly this process can be much aided by pictorial presentation. The success of Comenius' Orbis Pictus is now to be repeated with the lantern, and the representatives of men and things which are naturally inaccessible, can be given to the eye instead of using wearisome and ill-understood description. *
[The Victorian "magic lantern" was an early slide projector. Wikipedia]
* This represents, too, a vast economy of time. It is, of course, essential that the class be made to observe for themselves, and analyse the scenes portrayed, (a) the figures and their dress; (b) their grouping; and (c) made to realize that the representation is fanciful and not exact.
(4) The fourth, and to the teacher by far the most difficult mode of presentation, is the Socratic, which brings out the idea of good questioning. Those who would like to see what can be done with this method, should, if they have not already done so, read Plato's "Republic." In Dr. Jowett's translation they will find an English, as well as a Greek classic, of keen interest to a thoughtful mind. I know one mother, who, anticipating a dry duty, found in it an intellectual treat, surprised alike at its wit, its simplicity, and the present interest of the matters treated of. But the Socratic questions must not point directly to the answers which the teacher desires to elicit, or they become a machine for repressing activity, or leading the children to reply by mere guesses at what he wants said. And the sequence of the questioning must be as simple as severe, if the class is not to be made to think that anything may be proved by logic-chopping and clever verbiage.
Any or all of these may be combined according to the nature of the lesson and the capacities of the children: the choice and, when needful, rapid change of method is one of the evidences of that fine tact which marks the good teacher.
We may now resume the lessons considered in the last chapter--
(1) GEOGRAPHY--Children aged seven; time, thirty minutes. Preparation has lasted fifteen minutes. Show speciments of chalk, limestone, marble, granite, sandstone, flint. Elicit the physical characters of each,--colour, texture, friable or not, close or grained, hardness, relative hardness shown by which scratches the other (arrange in order of hardness), grittiness, porosity, etc. Ten minutes.
(2) PHYSICS--Children aged eight; thirty minutes. Preparation lasted five minutes. Show filter paper, also wet cotton wool packed in the stem of a funnel, and sponge similarly placed. Elicit that they are all porous, refer to the property of porous things. Filter some of the chalky water through each: water passing through is clear. Repeat with brine. Evaporate some of the filtered brine in a tea-spoon over spirit lamp,--salt is left. Repeat with sulphate of copper: elicit the fact that the dissolved salts pass through the porous substance. Fifteen minutes.
(3) GEOMETRY--Children aged ten; forty-five minutes. Preparation has lasted ten minutes. Construction with scale and compasses. Circles struck from each end of the base, with the same distance taken off the scale, have equal radii. Those radii drawn from the points where the circles cross one another are equal among the rest. Two isosceles triangles result. Ten minutes.
(4) HISTORY--Children aged nine: thirty minutes. Preparation, five minutes. Show physical map of England,--north and west barren and mountainous, south and east are fertile plains (they know all this from previous geography lessons, and the whole of this lesson may be given by questions and narrative, mixed). Elicit that the strongest races will keep the fertile lands. Caesar's story: three races in Britain-Gaels, Hibernians, and Britons, all Celtic (slide, Celtic type). Locality of each. Caesar's account, recalled from the Latin lessons. Storming of Colchester, and the battle against the Silures. The Roman roads and the fords of the rivers; why they took the directions chosen (slide, Roman Britain, map of the roads). Agricola's wall in the north. Stations of the Legions at York, Chester, and Caerieon. Scale distances, and show that as the legion could march thirty miles a day, they could reach any part of the mountain frontier in a week, and fall on flank or rear or any raiders. Detachments throughout the plain country. Conquest complete. Twenty minutes.
(5) LANGUAGE--Children aged nine: forty-five minutes. Preparation ten minutes. Series in different tenses and numbers. This is not a thought, no idea nor mind-picture having to be formed, language being a pure effort of memory aided by insensible association. There is no concept here, but only new means of expressing concepts.
(6) LITERATURE--Children aged twelve: forty-five minutes. Preparation, fifteen minutes. Presentation of the actual thing. Class read aloud by turns and explain meaning where needful, as far as possible without assistance. Twenty minutes.
The Presentation is now complete, and passes into the next stage, that whereby all the ideas called up are associated into one whole. There will often be no very marked transition between this and the last phase of reasoning, the office of the teacher being chiefly to see that the truly essential points are not lost sight of in the crowd of impressions which appeal to the child. But for the most part it will be found that the child associates all that has been said quite naturally, his brain in fact works as insensibly as his stomach--digestion is not a conscious process, though eating is.
Last comes the Formulation, or naming, in the one case, and the completed picture in the other, the real formation of this latter being verified by naming the parts of which it consists. Naming is purely the work of the teacher, "it is the short sharp stroke of the die which makes the black metal a current coin," the concept so fixed is the minted money of the mind. The name completes and defines the concept and every lesson must so end, only let the teacher remember that his first business is not to give names but to form ideas, the naming comes last.
A good teacher will keep his eye on the clock and observe the periods which he has decided are called for by the nature of the matter in hand, making, of course, such departures therefrom as the cases of the children demand. This is not difficult if the teacher refuses to be led into those side issues which waste time and lead to complete distraction from the main current of thought, causing a lesson to lead to "nothing in general," and the aggregate of such lessons to chaos.
Our Geography lesson has but five minutes left, but the presentation having been actual, by the things themselves, each child has associated the special physical characters of the specimens with the objects it has seen and handled. Take each specimen in turn and make the class state its characters. Then reverse the process, give the name to each and let the class repeat the name after hearing the qualities, five minutes.
In the Physics we have ten minutes still available, a longer time being allowed because the association here may prove more of a conscious effort. The children have reached the point that they see there is a difference in state. Elicit that the salt and the bluestone disappeared in the water, the chalk did not--the water remains transparent even when its colour is changed. Filter takes out the stuff in one case and not in the other. Elicit that a different name is needed to describe the two states. In the one case the stuff is said to be mixed with water; in the other case to be dissolved, and the class must be able to state distinctly, and in good English that the difference between them is that the mixed stuff can be filtered out and the dissolved stuff cannot. This is the completed lesson, and here it may be noted that this age is not able to grasp general laws, but only typical facts.
To complete our Geometry lesson we have twenty minutes, and this should be used for the deductive proof, which, not differing from the usual method, does not call for any special notice.
In History we shall not need more than the five minutes we have left, because the mind-picture has already been formed. The leading ideas to be associated are:--The physical nature of the ground, making it inaccessible or the reverse, marching power across the country or along roads, transport, amount of provision to be found in different localities, what areas are worth taking and guarding and first need protection, and so on, and the measures adopted to secure the result. The summing up of the salient points in each situation is an essential part of the history lesson. A well-known examiner told me not long since of a history teacher of quite exceptional ability in his presentation, who can keep his class white-hot with interest, who is nevertheless unable to make his boys retain the connected history in their minds, so that each successive examination* finds them with less and less digested knowledge. The reason was not far to seek; the iron was indeed heated, but the hammer strokes were not given, there was no summary of the essential, and it cooled again nearly into its old form. In our present lesson the essentials are:--The mountains and plains with their properties, the fords of the rivers, the roads, the war sustenance for masses of men, the communication with Gaul, and so with Rome; and the grasp of these is shown by the ability to call up the picture of Roman England, and locate its roads and garrisons on the blank physical map, and say why each was put in the place assigned to it.
* It is the fashion to decry examinations, and it cannot be denied that some examinations are unintelligent. But as a rule the public examinations are intended as tests of good general education; they do not involve specialized knowledge, and in order to pass them three things are requisite, (1) clear and correct ideas on the matter in hand, (2) the habit of expressing these ideas in good English, (3) neatness. Is it seriously maintained by those who inveigh against examinations that these are not legitimate tests, and that loose inaccurate information and want of ability to express what is known in good English, and the habit of dirty and careless work in mathematics or writing are satisfactory ends to "a liberal education"? Yet such is the exact fact. Relatively few boys when they leave school show good instruction in these three essentials. That is, they have not been taught to discriminate, nor to reason, nor to understand, nor to be neat and accurate in their work. And then follow a year or two of great effort and expensive "cramming" to catch up the time lost chiefly between the ages of eight and fifteen. But is the examination to blame?
The Literature lesson should not conclude with a dry resumé of the action in bald prose, but it may be well to bring out what has specially appealed to different children. This should be a most valuable lesson to the teacher, who can thus get a glimpse into the minds of his class which work far more definitely than, as a rule, he has any idea of. The Rational Lesson has now come to the end of its first half: the receptive process is complete. In the next article I purpose to deal with that which fixes and seals all knowledge, the great purpose and end of all education of which instruction is but a part, the transition from Saying to Doing.
Proofread by LNL, Aug. 2020