Essays on Educational ReformersQuick, Robert Hebert
History
Essays on Educational Reformers
Quick, Robert Hebert
Education -- History; Educators
1. We learn some facts by “intuition,” _i.e._, by direct experience.
It may be as well to make the number of them as large as possible. No
doubt there are no facts which are _known_ so perfectly as these. For
instance, a boy who has tried to smoke knows the fact that tobacco is
apt to produce nausea much better than another who has picked up the
information second-hand. An intelligent master may suggest experiments,
even in matters about which he himself is ignorant, and thus, in
Jacotot’s sense, he teaches things which he does not know. But some facts
cannot be learnt in this way, and then a Newton is helpless either to
find them out for himself, or to teach them to others without knowing
them. If the teacher does not know in what county Tavistock is, he can
only learn from those who do, and the pupils will be no cleverer than
their master. Here, then, I consider that Jacotot’s pretensions utterly
break down. “No,” the answer is; “the teacher may give his pupil an
atlas, and direct the boy to find out for himself: thus the master will
teach what he does not know.” But, in this case, he is a teacher only
so far as he knows. For what he does not know, he hands over the pupil
to the maker of the map, who communicates with him, not orally, but by
ink and paper. The master’s ignorance is simply an obstacle to the boy’s
learning; for the boy would learn sooner the position of Tavistock if it
were shown him on the map. “That’s the very point,” says the disciple of
Jacotot. “If the boy gets the knowledge without any trouble, he is likely
to forget it again directly. ‘Lightly come, lightly go.’ Moreover, his
faculty of observation will not have been exercised.” It is indeed well
not to allow the knowledge even of facts to come too easily; though the
difficulties which arise from the master’s ignorance will not be found
the most advantageous. Still there is obviously a limit. If we gave boys
their lessons in cipher, and offered a prize to the first decipherer,
one would probably be found at last, and meantime all the boys’ powers
of observation, &c., would have been cultivated by comparing like signs
in different positions, and guessing at their meaning; but the boys’
time might have been better employed. Jacotot’s plan of teaching a
language which the master did not know, was to put a book with, say,
“Arma virumque cano,” &c., on one side, and “I sing arms and the man,
&c.” on the other, and to require the pupil to puzzle over it till he
found out which word answered to which. In this case the teacher was the
translator; and though from the roundabout way in which the knowledge
was communicated the pupil derived some benefit, the benefit was hardly
sufficient to make up for the expenditure of time involved.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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