05 - The Law of The Lesson
CHAPTER FIVE THE LAW OF THE LESSON
1. Our fourth law takes us at once to the core of teaching. The first three laws dealt with the teacher, the learner, and the language, the medium of communication between them. We come now to the lesson, the process to be mastered, the problem to be solved. This is where the teacher must pass on to the pupils the recorded experience of the race; the method of transmission of this crystallized race experience must be such as to inspire these pupils with principles that shall be active forces in their lives, and at the same time furnish them with an instrument of research and further study -- this is the very heart of the work of the teacher, the condition and instrument, as well as the culmination and the fruit, of all the rest.
2. It is the Law of the Lesson that we are next to seek. Passing, as remote from this discussion, the steps by which the mind of an infant obtains its first notions of the world about it, we may go at once to the obvious fact that our pupils learn the new by the aid of the old and familiar. The new and unknown can be explained only by the familiar and the known. This, then, is the Law of the Lesson: THE TRUTH TO BE TAUGHT MUST BE LEARNED THROUGH TRUTH ALREADY KNOWN.
3. This law is neither so simple nor so obvious as those that have preceded it; but it is no less certain than they, while its scope is even wider and its relations are perhaps even more important. THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE LAW 4. The Law of the Lesson has its reason in the nature of mind and in the nature of human knowledge.
5. All teaching must begin at some point of the subject or lesson. If the subject is wholly new, then a known point must be sought by showing some likeness of the new to something known and familiar. Even among grown persons, the skilful narrator struggles to find some comparison with familiar experiences, seeking some likeness of the unknown to something known before proceeding with his story. Until this starting point is found, he knows that it will be useless to go on. To do so would be like telling someone to follow you over a winding path in the darkness without first letting him know where you are or starting him on the path. Naturally, if adults must have this aid, children can scarcely be expected to do without it. Often pupils in the schools explain their inability to understand the lesson by the simple statement: "I did not know what the teacher was talking about." The fault lies distinctly with the teacher in such a case.
6. All teaching must advance in some direction. Its proper direction of march should be toward the acquisition of new experiences. To teach over again what is already acquired and understood is to check the desire of the pupils for obtaining further knowledge and to deaden their power of attention by compelling them to walk in a treadmill, instead of leading them forward to the inspiration of new scenes and the conquest of new fields. It is a serious error to keep the studies of pupils too long on familiar ground under the assumed necessity for thoroughness. Old mines may be reworked if you can find ore at deeper levels, and old lessons may be worked over if new uses may be made of them. At this point it should be borne in mind that this does not contradict the Law of Review, to be discussed later.
7. Learning must proceed by graded steps. These steps must be those which link one fact or concept to another, as simple and concrete things lead naturally to general and abstract things, as premises lead to conclusions, and as an understanding of natural phenomena leads to laws. Each new idea mastered becomes a part of the knowledge of the child, a part of his equipment of race experience, and serves as a starting point for a fresh advance. It adds its own light to the knowledge that preceded it, and throws increased illumination forward for the next discovery. But each step must be fully mastered before the next is taken, or the pupils may find themselves proceeding into unknown fields without the proper preparation. It is here that the demand for thoroughness arises; everything in the lesson which is within the range of the child’s comprehension, should be fully understood. Thoroughness of this sort is the essential condition of true teaching. Imperfect understanding at any point clouds the whole process. The pupil who has mastered one lesson, half knows the next; therefore the well-taught class is always eager for the next step. One of the sayings of Pestalozzi was: "It is easy to add to what is already discovered."
8. But the philosophy of this law goes deeper still. It must be remembered that knowledge is not a mass of simple, independent facts; it is made up of the experience of the race crystallized and ORGANIZED in the form of facts together with their laws and relations. Facts are linked together in systems, associated by resemblances of one sort or another. Each fact leads to, and explains, another. The old reveals the new; the new confirms and corrects the old.
9. All this pertains equally to the limited knowledge and experience of children as well as to riper and maturer knowledge. New elements of knowledge must be brought into relation with other facts and truths already known before they themselves can be fully revealed and take their place in the widening circle of the experience of the learner. Thus the very nature of knowledge compels us to seek the new through the aid of the old.
10. The act of KNOWING is in part an act of comparing and judging -- of finding something in past experience that will explain and make meaningful the new experience. If a friend tells us of an experience or an adventure, we interpret his story by a running comparison with whatever has been most like it in our own experience; and if he states something utterly without likeness to anything that we have known, we ask him for explanations or illustrations which may bring the strange facts into relation with our point of view. If children are told something novel and entirely unfamiliar, they will probably struggle in vain to understand, and then ask for further information or light, if they do not at once abandon the attempt to connect the new idea with their own experience. Figures of speech, such as similes, metaphors, and allegories, have spring out of the need for relating new truths to old and are familiar scenes and objects and experiences. They are but so many attempts to reach the unknown through the known -- they try to flash light from the old upon the new.
11. Explanation, then, means usually the citation and use of fact and principles already understood to make clear the nature of new material. Therefore the unknown cannot explain the unknown. The knowledge already in the equipment of the child must furnish the explanation of now facts and laws, or these must remain unexplained. The difficulty so often met in answering the questions of little children, lies not so much in the difficulty of the questions themselves, as in the lack upon the part of the child of knowledge required in the explanation. To answer fully a boy’s questions about the stars, you must first teach him some astronomy. The lad who has seen a large city can perhaps understand fairly well a description of London or New York, but one whose experience has been confined entirely to his country home, cannot properly understand the network of streets, walled in by buildings, and the shifting panorama of city life.
12. The very language with which new knowledge must be expressed takes its meanings from what is already known and familiar. The child without knowledge would be also without words, for words are the signs of things known. An American traveler in Europe might perhaps fancy that he could make people understand by speaking in a loud, clear voice, and with slow, careful enunciation; but his success would be measured only by the degree to which his hearers had a knowledge of the native tongue of the American; if they were familiar only with their own different language, his words would be without meaning.
13. A blunder analogous to this is that of the teacher who hopes by the mere urgency of his manner, and by his carefully chosen words, familiar to himself, to convey his ideas to the understanding of his pupils, with no reference to the pupils’ previous knowledge of the subject.
14. Persons use by preference only the clearest and most familiar things in their interpretation of new facts or principles. Each man is prone to borrow his illustrations from his calling: the soldier from the camps and trenches, the sailor from the ships and the sea, the merchant from the conditions of the market, and the artisans and mechanics from their crafts. Likewise in study, each pupil is attracted to the qualities which relate to his own experience. To the chemist, common salt is sodium chloride, a binary compound; to the cook it is something to use in the seasoning of foods and in the preservation of meats. Each thinks of it in the aspect most familiar to him, and in this aspect would use it to illustrate something else in which salt was concerned. Finding a new plant, the botanist would consider it in the light of known plants, to discover its "classification"; the former would be interested in its use, and the artist in its beauty. This bent of preference, while one of the elements of prejudice which may shut the eyes to some now truths and open them to others, is at the same time one of the elements of strength in intellectual work.
15. A fact or principle only vaguely understood is used only rarely and reluctantly -- and even then sometimes most erroneously -- in interpreting now experiences; and if used, it carries only vagueness and imperfection into the new concepts or judgments. A cloud left upon the lesson of yesterday casts its shadow over the lesson of today. On the other hand, the thoroughly mastered lesson throws great light on the succeeding ones. Hence the value of that practice of some able teachers who make the elementary portions of a subject as familiar as household words -- a conquered territory from which the pupil may go on to new conquests as from an established base, with confidence and power.
16. But it must be carefully noted that so complete a mastery, like all thoroughness in study, is really relative. No human knowledge or power is perfect, and the capacities of childhood are necessarily much further from completeness than those of adults. And there are wide individual differences which must be recognized in the school. What to some children is as clear as day, is to others only vaguely suggestive. If the teacher makes the pupils talk about the lesson, as was suggested in the discussion of the law of language, some of these differences will be revealed, and the proper means of meeting them and of adjusting the instruction to them, may be discovered.
17. Our discussion of the lesson would be incomplete without some mention of the nature of the thinking process as applied to the solution of problems. The word "problem" is a familiar one to the teacher; the problems and tasks of everyday life in the schoolroom are very close to him. But let us now think of the problem in a rather different sense. We have been speaking of the "lesson" and its "law." Let us think of the process of learning lessons as akin to the solution of problems, as a process in which the learner faces a real situation, the mastery of which will involve the application of his power of thought. How is he to think?
18. The older notion that because the pupils in our schools are young and immature they are incapable of real thinking is a fallacy. Too often teachers believe that their pupils think only in a symbolic way -- that they react only to artificial situations in which their task is to do what the teacher wishes, rather than to do real independent thinking for themselves. This is not necessarily true, and if true in some instances, the fault very likely lies with the teacher himself. The fact is that the power to think is part and parcel of the original mental equipment of the child, and develops gradually, as other capacities do. The situations that call out this power in children are simple, but they are none the less real. The difference in thinking between the child and the adult is a difference in degree.
19. If we are to set the learner at the task of real thinking in the solution of real problems, we must define this process of thinking. There are three stages in the process. First, there must be a stage of doubt or uncertainty; certain things are known, and something is to be done to them. For example, the loss of a cherished toy presents just this situation to a child: he sees what has happened, and wonders what he can do in its absence -- how he can replace it, perhaps. Second, there is an organizing stage in which the individual considers the means at his disposal to reach the ends desired. Lastly, there is a critical attitude involving selection and rejection of the schemes which have suggested themselves. This problematic situation arises very frequently in daily life, with children as well as with adults. The setting of school tasks should always be done with this process of thinking in mind; teachers in the day schools and in the Sunday schools should remember that if the training which they give is to bear fruit, it must present real situations which will call forth this reflective attitude, and they should abjure the sort of tasks which can be met by trial and error, by blindly following the lead of another, or by doing what one has already done in a similar situation merely because one recognizes the new situation as like the other.
RULES FOR TEACHERS
20. In a very important sense, what we call knowledge is a record of solved problems. Facts and laws have been collected and tested and organized into systems, but at basis they represent the results of facing situations and finding things out at first hand. In passing knowledge on to others the more closely we can approximate real, vital situations, the better will be our teaching. There are some who go so far as to say that no attempt should be made to impart knowledge unless the child feels a distinct need for it -- unless he sees that it is essential to solve some problem that is real and vital to his life. This is doubtless an extreme view, but it is none the less incumbent upon the teacher to know what the problems of child life are and to utilize them in making his instruction just as rich and meaningful as possible.
21. This law of knowledge, thus explained, affords to the thoughtful teacher rules of the highest practical value. It offers clear guidance to those who are teachers of children and anxious that their task shall be well done.
(1)Find out what your pupils know of the subject you wish to teach to them; this is your starting point. This refers not only to textbook knowledge but to all information that they may possess, however acquired. (2)Make the most of the pupils’ knowledge and experience. Let them feel its extent and value, as a means to further knowledge. (3)Encourage your pupils to clear up and freshen their knowledge by a clear statement of it. (4)Begin with facts or ideas that lie near your pupils, and that can be reached by a single step from what is already familiar; thus, geography naturally begins with the home town, history with the pupils’ own memories, morals with their own conscience. (5)Relate every lesson as much as possible to former lessons, and with the pupils’ knowledge and experience. (6)Arrange your presentation so that each step of the lesson shall lead easily and naturally to the next. (7)Proportion the steps of the lesson to the ages and attainments of your pupils. Do not discourage your children with lessons or exercises that are too long, or fail to rise to the expectations of older pupils by giving them lessons that are too easy. (8)Find illustrations in the commonest and most familiar objects suitable for the purpose. (9)Lead the pupils themselves to find illustrations from their own experience. (10)Make every new fact or principle familiar to your pupils; try to establish and intrench it firmly, so that it will be available for use in explaining new material to come. (11)Urge the pupils to make use of their own knowledge and attainments in every way that is practicable, to find or explain other knowledge. Teach them that knowledge is power by showing how knowledge really helps to solve problems. (12)Make every advance clear and familiar, so that the progress to the next succeeding step shall in every case be on known ground. (13)As far as possible, choose the problems which you give to your pupils from their own activities, and thus increase the chances that they will be real and not artificial problems. (14)Remember that your pupils are learning to think, and that to think properly they must learn to face intelligently and reflectively the problems that arise in connection with their school work, and in connection with their life outside of school.
MISTAKES AND VIOLATIONS
22. The wide scope of this Law of the Lesson affords opportunity for many mistakes and violations. Among the more common are the following:
(1)It is not unusual for teachers to set their pupils to studying new lessons, or even new subjects, for which they are inadequately prepared or not prepared at all, either by previous study or by experience. (2)Many teachers neglect entirely to ascertain carefully the pupils’ equipment with which to begin the subject. (3)A common error is the failure to connect the new lessons with those that have gone before in such a way that the pupils can carry over what they know or have learned into the new field. Many individual lessons and recitations are treated as if each were independent of all the others. (4)Oftentimes past acquisitions are considered goods stored away, instead of instruments for further use. (5)Too often elementary facts and definitions are not made thoroughly familiar. (6)Every step is not always thoroughly understood before the next is attempted. (7)Some teachers err in assigning lessons or exercises that are too long for the powers of the pupils, or for their time, making impossible an adequate mastery of principles that may be needful for future progress in the subject. (8)Teachers frequently fail to place their pupils in the attitude of discoverers. Children should learn to use what they have already keen taught in the discovery of new problems. (9)A common fault is the failure to show the connections between parts of the subject that have been taught and those that are yet to come.
23. As a consequence of these and other violations of the law, much teaching is poor, and its benefits, if any, are fleeting. People are found to have inadequate knowledge and to lack the power of studying for themselves. This is as true of Biblical knowledge as of any other. Instead of a related whole, a concept with one purpose, the Bible is viewed as scattering parts, like bits of broken glass, and its effect is many times only to puzzle and confuse; it is never seen as a connected whole, as it should be.