How To Study and Teaching How To Study | Page 8

has been suggested. Yet even these may be only ideas; what means has he for knowing when they have been attained? It is a long distance from the first approach to an important thought, to its final assimilation, and nothing is easier than to stop too soon. If there are any waymarks along the road, indicating the different stages reached; particularly, if there is a recognizable endpoint assuring mastery, one might avoid many dangerous headers by knowing the fact. Or is that particularly what recitations and marks are for? And instead of expecting an independent way of determining when he has mastered a subject, should the student simply rely upon his teacher to acquaint him with that fact?
7. The tentative attitude as a seventh factor in study
Investigators of the source of yellow fever previous to Dr. Reed reached conclusions as well as he. But, in the light of later discovery, they appear hasty and foolish, to the extent that they were insisted upon as correct. A large percentage of the so-called discoveries that are made, even by laboratory experiment, are later disproved. Even in regard to this very valuable work of Dr. Reed and his associates, one may feel too sure. It is quite possible that future study will materially supplement and modify our present knowledge of the subject. The scientist, therefore, may well assume an attitude of doubt toward all the results that he achieves.
Does the same hold for the young student? Is all our knowledge more or less doubtful, so that we should hold ourselves ready to modify our ideas at any time? And, remembering the common tendency to become dogmatic and unprogressive on that account, should the young student, in particular, regard some degree of uncertainty about his facts as the ideal state of mind for him to reach? Or would such uncertainty too easily undermine his self-confidence and render him vacillating in action? And should firmly fixed ideas, rather than those that are somewhat uncertain, be regarded as his goal, so that the extent to which he feels sure of his knowledge may be taken as one measure of his progress? Or can it be that there are two kinds of knowledge? That some facts are true for all time, and can be learned as absolutely true; and that others are only probabilities and must be treated as such? In that case, which is of the former kind, and which is of the latter?
8. Provision for individuality as an eighth factor in study
The scientific investigator must determine upon his own hypotheses; he must collect and organize his data, must judge their soundness and trace their consequences; and he must finally decide for himself when he has finished a task. All this requires a high degree of intellectual independence, which is possible only through a healthy development of individuality, or of the native self.
A normal self giving a certain degree of independence and even a touch of originality to all of his thoughts and actions is essential to the student's proper advance, as to the work of the scientist. Should the student, therefore, be taught to believe in and trust himself, holding his own powers and tendencies in high esteem? Should he learn even to ascribe whatever merit he may possess to the qualities that are peculiar to him? And should he, accordingly, look upon the ideas and influences of other persons merely as a means--though most valuable--for the development of this self that he holds so sacred? Or should he learn to depreciate himself, to deplore those qualities that distinguish him from others? And should he, in consequence, regard the ideas and influences of others as a valuable means of suppressing, or escaping from, his native self and of making him like other persons?
Here are two very different directions in which one may develop. In which direction does human nature most tend? In which direction do educational institutions, in particular, exert their influence? Does the average student, for example, subordinate his teachers and the ideas he acquires to himself? Or does he become subordinated to these, even submerged by them? This is the most important of all the problems concerning study; indeed, it is the one in which all the others culminate.
The ability of children to study
The above constitute the principal factors in study. But two other problems are of vital importance for the elementary school.
Studying is evidently a complex and taxing kind of work. Even though the above discussions reveal the main factors in the study of adults, what light does it throw upon the work of children? Is their study to contain these factors also? The first of these two questions, therefore, is, Can children from six to fourteen years of age really be expected to study?
It is not the custom in German elementary