St Ignatius College - Ignatian Yearbook (San Francisco, CA)

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36 IGNATIAN be cultivated by the gorging system, it is not easy to see, especially when we remember that, as the aboveillustration shows, it is rarely possible to acquire clearness and accuracy and precision on even one subject. Macaulay expresses his surprise that even the great mind of Milton, so crowded with information, was capable of rising superior to the difficulty which we have suggested. So intense and ardent was the fire of his mind, Macaulay says of Milton, that it not only was not suffocated beneath the weight of fuel, but penetrated the whole superincumbent mass with its own heat and radiance. Few, if any, have minds with a heat and radiance similar to that of Milton'sg few can wear the gorgeous and terrible panoply which his genius was accustomed to wear g and shall we make education consist in piling on fuel, and increasing the superincumbent mass of information. If we do, the result will inevitably be suifocation, and the number of mute inglorious Miltons will be increased by the very process which should tend to de- crease the number. This is the first flaw-it is positive and consists in over- loading the 1nem0'ry. The second flaw is negative and may be described as an utter neglect of the understanding, As already indicated, there is a connection between these two powers, the one assimilates what the other supplies, but this process of assimilation needs attention. Any normal boy or girl can gather information and if one lives long enough in- formation will force itself on the mindg but very few do any real thinking, because they have not been trained to think. To think means, above all things, to pass clear, accurate and correct judgments, to examine premises and to draw conclu- sions, to ask the why and the wherefore of things. This some one may say is the function of logic and provision is made for logic in the universities. It is the function of logic, to be sure, but logic is as natural to the mind as sight is to the eye, and unless crushed, as it may be, it will assert itself in every imaginable circumstance. The fool factoriesn are doing all they can to crush it, as we have seen, and nothing at all to train it, as we shall see.

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PEDAGOGICAL BEWILDERMENT 35 thology, Roman history, English mythology, English history, English drama, music, painting, Roman insurgency, American insurgency, botany, sociology, evolution, the negro question, equal suffrage, American fiction, American politics, forestry, exploration, boycotting and trades unionism, and other things-if they showed a certain amount of information on all these subjects should we not deplore the system that con- siders the model boy or girl one who, to use Tennyson's ex- pression, is Ugorged with knowledgev? Should we not con- demn the system that is making an ideal of intellectual glut- tony? A senator of the United States is reported as having said that he spoke so often about tariff reform, proposed so many bills and amendments to bills, that he was beginning to understand the meaning of tariff. In fact, it is said that there is only one man in the United States who-if locked in a room, in order to separate him from books-could write an intelligent treatise on the traiff. It is a forcible illustration of our intellectual limitations. Hence when we find a learned professor deploring the fact that the girls whom he examined were not better informed, at least on contemporaneous events, it seems to us that his ideal of education is what we generally call cram- ming. When we find that his reformation is to consist in administering more of the embalmed stuff that fills the maga- zines and newspapers, it seems that the remedy-if we under- stand it aright-is far worse than the disease. This cram- ming with mere information and especially this cramming with misinformation is, in the purely intellectual order, the first great i-law in our present day pedagogics, this it is, more than anything else, that makes the fool factories what they are. To remove the original dimness of the mindis eye, to strengthen and perfect its vision, to enable it to look out into the World, right forward, steadily and truly, to give the mind clearness, accuracy, precision 5 to enable it to use words arightg to understand what it says g to conceive justly what it thinks is, according to Newman, the object of intellectual education. How the clearness, accuracy and precision can

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PEDAGOGICAL BEWILDERMENT 37 The great training school for thought, apart from other and higher advantages, is classical education. Latin and Greek have been called the parallel bars in the intellectual gymna- sium. A student cannot translate a single Latin or Greek line into English, or a single English line into Latin or Greek without asking himself why as many times as there are words in the sentence. The advantage possessed by the B. C. languages, in this regard, over modern languages consists in this, that they are supremely logical in their structure. You may not be able to find very many utilitarian reasons in favor of classical study, if you are superiicially utilitarian, but if it is of any use to be able to think aright, then, even from an utilitarian viewpoint, the classical languages are capable of justification. Another great result of classical training' is that it de- velops attention or concentration. What is needed now more than anything else is this power of concentration, this power to direct our thoughts along certain definite lines, and hold them there. Every teacher knows that this is the great de- sideratum of a classroom, to keep the students from wander- ing and day-dreamingg and every teacher knows that, with the power of concentration or attentive reading, one can do more in one day, in the way of acquiring information, than in a whole year without that power. Information is indeed necessaryg the truly educated man is one who knows something about everything and everything about something, but actual experience has very amply dem- onstrated that undigested and unclassified information is crowded out by what is added and that the high school pupils are forgetting what they learn in the school to make room for what they learn outside the school, forgetting what they learn one year to make room for the lessons of the next. This is not the case with assimilated knowledge, and so if we are to educate in the true sense of the word, We must train the youthful mind in the process of assimilation, practice it in the art of making its own the thought of others and the methods of arriving at thought which others follow. This, in a word, is to teach them how to think. No one need