XX
THINKING AND DOING

The best methods of instruction in the ordinary school aim at the expression of thought in language. If a thing has been well said, the teacher and the examiner are apt to make no further inquiries. Although the expression of thought in written or spoken language is a species of doing, there is often a wide chasm between getting a thing said and having it done. Many of the reforms and revolutions thought out by university professors never get beyond the room in which they lecture or the page on which they formulate their ideas. The freedom of speech in the universities never troubles a despotic government until the ideas of the professors and students show signs of passing into the life of the nation. The difference between speech and action, between the man of words and the man of deeds, has long been felt and emphasized. The favorite method of teaching by lectures, and requiring the pupil to take notes, fails utterly if it stops with mere telling how a thing is to be done, and is not followed by actual doing on the part of the learner. Work in the shop, in the field, and in the factory often proves more effective in fitting a boy to earn a living than the theoretical instruction of the schools. The advantage of doing over telling as a means of learning has led to the formulation of the maxim, “We learn to do by doing,” and some educational reformers have announced the maxim as a principle of education universal in its application. Hence it is worth while to clarify its meaning and to ascertain its limitations. In so doing, we shall get a glimpse of the true relation between thinking and doing.

A young man possessed of unbounded faith in this maxim came to town for the purpose of practising medicine and surgery. He announced that if any persons got sick he proposed to give them medicine in the hope of learning the physiological and therapeutic effects of the various drugs. If any limbs were to be amputated, he was willing to try his hand, in the hope of ultimately learning how to perform surgical operations. He was too simple to succeed as a quack. He did not get a single patient; the people wisely gave him no opportunity of learning to do by doing.

Equally foolish were it thus to apply the maxim to any of the other professions. Would you, with life or property at stake, allow a novice to plead your cause at court in order that he might learn to plead by pleading? Who would waste the golden Sabbath hours in listening to one who was trying to learn to preach by preaching? The civilized world regards knowledge, which is the product of the act of learning, as the indispensable guide of those who offer their services at the bar, from the pulpit, or in the sick-room. When a Yale professor was asked whether study was required of those divinely called to preach, he replied that he had read of but one instance in which the Lord condescended to speak through the mouth of an ass.

Even an ass may learn to do some things by continually doing them in a blind way, and that, too, in spite of his proverbial stubbornness; but such learning by blind practice is unworthy of the school-life of a being gifted with human intelligence, and capable, it may be, of filling a profession. Instinct may guide a bee or a beaver: but knowledge should guide man in the arts and habits which he acquires. This fact is not ignored in the maxim as originally given by Comenius. “Things to be done should be learned by doing them. Mechanics understand this well: they do not give the apprentice a lecture upon their trade, but they will let him see how they, as masters, do; then they place the tool in his hands, teach him to use it and imitate them. Doing can be learned only by doing, writing by writing, painting by painting, and so on.” There is in this statement a clear recognition, on the one hand, of the knowledge-getting which precedes and accompanies all intelligent doing, and, on the other, of the practice which is needful for the attainment of skill. The master mechanic seeks first to give his apprentice a clear concept of what is to be done; and the knowledge thus acquired through the eye, and perhaps partly through hearing directions and explanations, is afterwards put into practice by the actual manipulation of tools and materials. If the maxim had been allowed to stand in this, its original form and meaning, no one could have objected to its use and application. But when the attempt was made to elevate it into a principle of binding force for all teaching; when, furthermore, the form was shortened so as to widen the meaning, and the maxim was then applied to regulate the acquisition of every form of human activity, both physical and mental, it is not surprising that protests were heard, and the necessity was felt of investigating the maxim for the purpose of ascertaining its limitations and defining its meaning.

Yet we must not fail to make grateful acknowledgment of the services to education rendered by those who lifted the maxim into prominence. How often were pupils expected to learn one thing by doing another. Drawing was advocated because it would improve the penmanship. Silent reading or thought-getting was to be learned by oral reading or thought-giving. The alphabet was taught as if the names of the letters would make the child familiar with the sounds. The idea of number was to be gotten by naming the numbers or imitating the Arabic notation. Facility and accuracy in the use of language were to be acquired from exercises in parsing and analysis. Familiarity with birds, flowers, minerals, chemicals, etc., was to be gained from the learned phraseology of the text-books. Sometimes even the teachers knew very little more than the technical terms. When the great ornithologist, Wilson, visited Princeton College, the professor of natural history scarcely knew a sparrow from a woodpecker. A great change has come over Princeton and all other higher institutions of learning; and the new influence has been felt in our high schools, and even in the grades below.

Whilst cheerfully acknowledging the value of the maxim of Comenius, we should, nevertheless, insist on the difference between a maxim which may regulate our conduct in specific cases and a principle which is an all-controlling guide in operations. Coleridge says, “A maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is speculative; a principle has truth in itself, and is prospective.” It is always dangerous to generalize upon facts observed in one realm of investigation, and then to allow others to apply these general statements to realms as diverse from the original field of observation as mind or spirit is from matter. The disciples in such cases always manifest the hidden weaknesses in the system of their master. They rush in where he would have feared to tread. They push his language to extremes, from which his deeper insight, broader vision, and larger experience would have caused him to shrink. Comenius framed the maxim from the observation of bodily acts; some seek to apply it to every form of human activity. The original language has been twisted into a statement that sounds paradoxical. “We learn to do by doing.” What can these words mean? If we can do a given thing, what need is there of learning to do that thing. If we cannot do the thing to be learned by the doing of it, how can any doing on our part issue in learning? Evidently the maxim in its modern form, if it is at all valid, must partake of the nature of a paradox, which, though seemingly absurd, is yet true in essence or fact. For the purpose of testing the validity of a paradoxical statement, there is no better way than to ascertain its possible meanings, to eliminate those evidently not intended, and finally to investigate the one or more senses or interpretations that may legitimately be put upon the language. The investigation will, in this instance, reveal the relation existing between doing and the act of learning.

In the first place, the maxim cannot mean that we learn to do by every kind of doing. The kind of doing by which the young man hoped to learn medicine and surgery was ridiculed centuries ago; no one in our day would advocate mere blind doing as a means of learning. The maxim must refer to doing guided by an intelligent will. The doing must be guided by thinking that is based upon correct and reliable data or premises.

Again, the maxim cannot mean that we learn one thing by doing another. The maxim was emphasized in protest against the absurdity of some of our methods of teaching. It may happen that the learner accidentally discovers one thing while seeking to find out some other thing; to expect that this shall always be the case is to invite disappointment. For instance, pupils do not learn to spell while studying books if attention is absorbed in the meaning, and is not drawn, in separate exercises, to the correct orthography of words that are apt to be misspelled.

There is a third limitation to the maxim on the side of attention. How, for instance, is the art of writing acquired? It is undoubtedly true that a boy cannot learn to write without himself writing; it is equally true that he is not always learning or improving in penmanship while he is practising with his pen upon paper. From the teacher or the copy he gets a concept of the letters to be made. The first efforts at imitation are fraught with defects. The pupil must clearly recognize wherein he failed, and earnestly strive to remedy the defects, if the next attempt is to be an improvement. The maxim, if here applied, must mean that the pupil learns to do by continually doing, as nearly as he can, the thing to be done. With each step of progress, his concept of the form of the letters and how to make them becomes more accurate; or, in other words, his power and skill keep pace with his knowledge. Finally, after much practice, the nerves and muscles which control the act of writing are properly co-ordinated; the habit of writing with ease is acquired; the process becomes largely subconscious, if not altogether automatic. The learner has at length reached the stage in which his attention is no longer concentrated upon the form and beauty of the letters, but rather upon the thought to be expressed, and it is quite possible that henceforth his chirography will grow more illegible the more he writes. Of course, he is now learning the art of composing by composing; but he has ceased to learn in the direction of his handwriting by writing, because the attention is riveted upon something else. Even before the subconscious stage is reached, practice, if too long continued, may exhaust the powers of attention, and doing can no longer issue in learning by reason of fatigue.

On the score of attention there is a limit to the application of the maxim in another direction. Talking, oral reading, and public speaking may be spoiled by too much attention. Practice in these, under the guidance of an injudicious teacher, may serve to make the gestures too studied, the pronunciation too precise, and the tones of the voice too artificial, defects by which the hearer’s mind is drawn from the thought to the delivery.

The lack of good elocutionary drill in youth is a serious misfortune, yet the writer cannot help blaming the elocutionists for ruining one public speaker among his acquaintances. Under their tuition the gestures and articulation of this friend have become almost faultless; but there is such a self-conscious air about his platform utterances that the audience can think of nothing except the delivery. By his efforts at doing he has learned most emphatically not to do. The same thing may happen in elementary instruction, and in the practice-schools connected with our State normal schools. Injudicious criticism by the teacher may so rivet the attention upon the utterance that the pupils lose sight of the thought to be expressed, and the more they practise under his guidance the worse their reading becomes. The vocal and physical elements, in the act of oral reading or speaking, should spring spontaneously out of the thought and sentiment to be conveyed. Any drill which interferes with this natural connection between the mental and the physical is indescribably bad, and should never be regarded as a means of learning. Equally severe must be the sentence of condemnation upon much of the criticism to which pupil teachers are subjected by their fellow-students and their critic-teachers at our normal schools, and upon the comments made by candidates for the ministry and their professors upon the efforts of the embryo preacher during the so-called homiletical exercises. Injudicious fault-finding leads to a kind of doing which cannot issue in learning.

Within these limitations we find a wide field for the application of the maxim to our efforts at learning to think and to express thought. The hand performs a very important function in aiding the mind to perfect its concepts. The metric system remains a dark, confused mass of names so long as the pupil does not actually handle and use the metric units of weights and measures. A few days of manual training, during which the learner is compelled to measure accurately, are of immense account in developing accurate ideas and accurate thinking. Of all the ways of expressing thought, those by the hand and the tongue are more perfect than those by the eye, the face, the gesture, the bodily movement. The latter are well adapted to express feeling; the former, to express thought. Few have ever thought of the marvellous mechanism given to a human being in the arm and hand. A glimpse from the mathematician’s point of view is here very interesting. A pencil fastened to the end of a ruler revolving around a fixed point will describe a circle. If the pencil be fastened to the end of a second ruler revolving around the end of the first, while the first revolves around the original centre, the pencil will describe a very complicated curve. If three radii, revolving in this way, be joined together, the pencil at the end of the third can be made to describe the cycles and epicycles by which the ancient astronomers explained the movements of the planets. The modern mathematician has shown that, by annexing a fourth, a fifth, and a sixth radius, each revolving around the preceding, while the first is moving around the original centre, all curves of the fifth and sixth orders can be described. Let any one examine his right arm, starting from the shoulder and ending with the fingers, and he will find that since infancy he has had this mechanism for executing curves and movements, has been using this wonderful system of revolving radii to express thought, and that it has been to him a source of skill in thinking and doing. When viewed in their anatomical and physiological aspects, human arms and hands are seen to be a still more wonderful mechanism, rivalled only by the tongue in capability for describing any curve and uttering any kind of thought. Whilst the tongue may speak many oral languages, the hand writes them all, and supplies additional methods for expressing thought in drawing, painting, sculpture, instrumental music, in the various handicrafts, and in the machines which act like man’s hand made bigger, more powerful, more tireless.

From this point of view one can see a wide field for the intelligent application of the maxim to our efforts at learning to write, to talk, to walk, to play on a musical instrument, or to handle the tools of some handicraft. If questioned with reference to these and kindred activities, the physiologist would answer that the repeated action of the nerves and muscles in specific functions fits them the better to act in the same functions, and that the effect of the exercise of any function may be stored up so as to increase the facility of the nervous structure to exercise again every similar function. The psychologist would say that any normal act performed under the guidance of an intelligent will leaves, as its enduring result, an increased power to act and a tendency to act again in like manner. Common parlance, which is apt to enshrine its wisdom in proverbs, simply says, Practice makes perfect. Doing, when it engrosses the attention, exerts a reflex influence upon thinking; after it sinks to the subconscious level it ceases to exert a helpful influence. The methods adopted in our manual-training schools are, in this respect, much superior to those pursued under the old apprentice system. The master mechanic found it to his interest to keep the apprentice upon one kind of work until a high degree of skill was attained. He used the apprentice as a means to an end,—the end being the production of things that would sell and thus reimburse the master for the time and trouble of teaching his trade to another. The mysteries of the trade were kept to the last for fear the apprentice would quit before the expiration of the time for which he was indentured. No better plan for crushing the intellectual life could have been conceived. The manual-training school, on the other hand, makes the boy, and not the product, the end of its training, the object of chief concern. It seeks not merely to make the man a better workman, but the workman a better man. No pupil is asked to go through the same movement, to do the same piece of work, for the purpose of developing skill, until every trace of interest is gone. Nothing is made for the purpose of selling; everything prescribed is for the purpose of developing the pupil’s powers, to enable him to express thought by the use of working-tools and instruments. The working-drawing and the model are the symbols which come nearest to a full representation of the thing to be made. The word, the clay, the stone, the metal, the leather, the cloth, are the materials in which thought finds its final expression. Nothing is carried so far as to deaden the boy’s interest in what he is doing; the charm of novelty is kept up from day to day. If the first product is defective, a new problem is set, involving the same fundamental operations, or the use of the same tools and instruments. The manual-training school and the trade school, if properly conducted, thus become a most valuable means for developing the power to think in things. It aims to create the power to think, as well as the power to do; the two are made commensurate and mutually helpful. The thinking is made to issue in doing, and the doing is kept from sinking into the subconscious stage, where it tends to degrade the individual to the mere level of a machine. Within these limitations we can endorse Professor Wilson’s tribute to the hand, and subscribe to his demand that, as in the days of Israel’s glory, it shall be trained in some useful handicraft, not merely as a means of livelihood, but more especially as a means of making the pupil a better thinker, a completer man.

“When I think of all that man’s and woman’s hand has wrought,” says he, “from the day that Eve put forth her erring hand to pluck the fruit of the forbidden tree to that dark hour when the pierced hands of the Saviour were nailed to the predicted tree of shame, and of all that human hands have wrought of good and evil since, I lift up my hand and gaze upon it with wonder and awe. What an instrument for good it is! What an instrument for evil! And all day long it never is idle. There is no implement which it cannot wield, and it should never in working hours be without one. We unwisely restrict the term handicrafts-man or hand-worker to the more laborious callings; but it belongs to all honest, earnest men and women, and is a title which each should covet. For the queen’s hand there is the sceptre, and for the soldier’s hand the sword; for the carpenter’s hand the saw, and for the smith’s hand the hammer; for the farmer’s hand the plough; for the miner’s hand the spade; for the sailor’s hand the oar; for the painter’s hand the brush; for the sculptor’s hand the chisel; for the poet’s hand the pen; and for woman’s hand the needle. And if none of these, or the like, will fit us, the felon’s chain should be round our wrist, and our hand on the prisoner’s crank. But for each willing man or woman there is a tool they may learn to handle; for all there is the command, ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might.’”