Some of the points of the foregoing logical analysis may be clinched by
a consideration of their educational implications, especially with
reference to certain practices that grow out of a false separation by
which each is thought to be independent of the other and complete in
itself. (_i_) In some school subjects, or at all events in some topics
or in some lessons, the pupils are immersed in details; their minds are
loaded with disconnected items (whether gleaned by observation and
memory, or accepted on hearsay and authority). Induction is treated as
beginning and ending with the amassing of facts, of particular isolated
pieces of information. That these items are educative only as suggesting
a view of some larger situation in which the particulars are included
and thereby accounted for, is ignored. In object lessons in elementary
education and in laboratory instruction in higher education, the subject
is often so treated that the student fails to "see the forest on account
of the trees." Things and their qualities are retailed and detailed,
without reference to a more general character which they stand for and
mean. Or, in the laboratory, the student becomes engrossed in the
processes of manipulation,--irrespective of the reason for their
performance, without recognizing a typical problem for the solution of
which they afford the appropriate method. Only deduction brings out and
emphasizes consecutive relationships, and only when _relationships_ are
held in view does learning become more than a miscellaneous scrap-bag.
[Sidenote: Failure to follow up by reasoning]
(_ii_) Again, the mind is allowed to hurry on to a vague notion of the
whole of which the fragmentary facts are portions, without any attempt
to become conscious of _how_ they are bound together as parts of this
whole. The student feels that "in a general way," as we say, the facts
of the history or geography lesson are related thus and so; but "in a
general way" here stands only for "in a vague way," somehow or other,
with no clear recognition of just how.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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