In the main, for most persons, the primary resource in the development
of orderly habits of thought is indirect, not direct. Intellectual
organization originates and for a time grows as an accompaniment of the
organization of the acts required to realize an end, not as the result
of a direct appeal to thinking power. The need of thinking to accomplish
something beyond thinking is more potent than thinking for its own sake.
All people at the outset, and the majority of people probably all their
lives, attain ordering of thought through ordering of action. Adults
normally carry on some occupation, profession, pursuit; and this
furnishes the continuous axis about which their knowledge, their
beliefs, and their habits of reaching and testing conclusions are
organized. Observations that have to do with the efficient performance
of their calling are extended and rendered precise. Information related
to it is not merely amassed and then left in a heap; it is classified
and subdivided so as to be available as it is needed. Inferences are
made by most men not from purely speculative motives, but because they
are involved in the efficient performance of "the duties involved in
their several callings." Thus their inferences are constantly tested by
results achieved; futile and scattering methods tend to be discounted;
orderly arrangements have a premium put upon them. The event, the issue,
stands as a constant check on the thinking that has led up to it; and
this discipline by efficiency in action is the chief sanction, in
practically all who are not scientific specialists, of orderliness of
thought.
Such a resource--the main prop of disciplined thinking in adult life--is
not to be despised in training the young in right intellectual habits.
There are, however, profound differences between the immature and the
adult in the matter of organized activity--differences which must be
taken seriously into account in any educational use of activities: (_i_)
The external achievement resulting from activity is a more urgent
necessity with the adult, and hence is with him a more effective means
of discipline of mind than with the child; (_ii_) The ends of adult
activity are more specialized than those of child activity.
[Sidenote: Peculiar difficulty with children]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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