THE whole aim of good teaching is to turn the young learner, by nature a little copycat, into an independent, self-propelled creature who can work as his own boss to the limit of his powers. This is to turn pupils into students, and it can be done on any rung of the ladder of learning. When I was a child, the multiplication table was taught from a printed sheet which had to be memorized one square at a time – the one’s and the two’s and so on up to nine. It never occurred to the teacher to show us how the answers could be arrived at by addition which we already knew. No one said, “Look : if four times four is sixteen, you ought to be able to figure out, without aid from memory, what five times four is, because that amounts to four more one’s added to the sixteen.” This would at first have been puzzling, more complicated and difficult than memory work but once explained and grasped. It would have been an instrument for learning and checking the whole business of multiplication. We could temporarily have dispensed with the teacher and cut loose from the printed table.
This is another way of saying that the only thing worth teaching anybody is a principle. Naturally, principles involve facts and some facts must be learned “bare” because they do not rest on any principle. The capital of Alaska is Juneau and, so far as I know, that is all there is to it: but a European child ought not to learn that Washington is the capital of the United States without fixing firmly in his mind the relation between the city and the man who led his countrymen to freedom. That would be missing an association, which is the germ of a principle. And just as a complex athletic feat is made possible by rapid and accurate coordination, so all valuable learning hangs together and works by association which make sense.
THE whole aim of good teaching is to turn the young learner, by nature a little copycat, into an independent, self-propelled creature who can work as his own boss to the limit of his powers. This is to turn pupils into students, and it can be done on any rung of the ladder of learning. When I was a child, the multiplication table was taught from a printed sheet which had to be memorized one square at a time – the one’s and the two’s and so on up to nine. It never occurred to the teacher to show us how the answers could be arrived at by addition which we already knew. No one said, “Look : if four times four is sixteen, you ought to be able to figure out, without aid from memory, what five times four is, because that amounts to four more one’s added to the sixteen.” This would at first have been puzzling, more complicated and difficult than memory work but once explained and grasped. It would have been an instrument for learning and checking the whole business of multiplication. We could temporarily have dispensed with the teacher and cut loose from the printed table.This is another way of saying that the only thing worth teaching anybody is a principle. Naturally, principles involve facts and some facts must be learned “bare” because they do not rest on any principle. The capital of Alaska is Juneau and, so far as I know, that is all there is to it: but a European child ought not to learn that Washington is the capital of the United States without fixing firmly in his mind the relation between the city and the man who led his countrymen to freedom. That would be missing an association, which is the germ of a principle. And just as a complex athletic feat is made possible by rapid and accurate coordination, so all valuable learning hangs together and works by association which make sense.
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