Our schools are troubled with a multiplication of studies, each in turn having its own multiplication of materials and principles. Our teachers find their tasks made heavier in that they have come to deal with pupils individually and not merely in mass. Unless these steps in advance are to end in distraction, some clew of unity, some principle that makes for simplification, must be found. This book represents the conviction that the needed steadying and centralizing factor is found in adopting as the end of endeavor that attitude of mind, that habit of thought, which we call scientific. This scientific attitude of mind might, conceivably, be quite irrelevant to teaching children and youth. But this book also represents the conviction that such is not the case; that the native and unspoiled attitude of childhood, marked by ardent curiosity, fertile imagination, and love of experimental inquiry, is near, very near, to the attitude of the scientific mind. If these pages assist any to appreciate this kinship and to consider seriously how its recognition in educational practice would make for individual happiness and the reduction of social waste, the book will amply have served its purpose.
It is hardly necessary to enumerate the authors to whom I am indebted. My fundamental indebtedness is to my wife, by whom the ideas of this book were inspired, and through whose work in connection with the Laboratory School, existing in Chicago between 1896 and 1903, the ideas attained such concreteness as comes from embodiment and testing in practice. It is a pleasure, also, to acknowledge indebtedness to the intelligence and sympathy of those who coöperated as teachers and supervisors in the conduct of that school, and especially to Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, then a colleague in the University, and now Superintendent of the Schools of Chicago.
New York City, December, 1909.
CONTENTS
PART I
THE PROBLEM OF TRAINING THOUGHT
CHAPTER
PAGE
I.
What is Thought?
1
II.
The Need for Training Thought
14
III.
Natural Resources in the Training of Thought
29
IV.
School Conditions and the Training of Thought
45
V.
The Means and End of Mental Training: the Psychological and the Logical
56
PART II
LOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS
VI.
The Analysis of a Complete Act of Thought
68
VII.
Systematic Inference: Induction and Deduction
79
VIII.
Judgment: The Interpretation of Facts
101
IX.
Meaning: or Conceptions and Understanding
116
X.
Concrete and Abstract Thinking
135
XI.
Empirical and Scientific Thinking
145
PART III
THE TRAINING OF THOUGHT
XII.
Activity and the Training of Thought
157
XIII.
Language and the Training of Thought
170
XIV.
Observation and Information in the Training of Mind
188
XV.
The Recitation and the Training of Thought
201
XVI.
Some General Conclusions
214
HOW WE THINK
PART ONE: THE PROBLEM OF
TRAINING THOUGHT
CHAPTER ONE
WHAT IS THOUGHT?
§ 1. Varied Senses of the Term
Four senses of thought, from the wider to the limited
No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied, indeed, is our use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them. The aim of this chapter is to find a single consistent meaning. Assistance may be had by considering some typical ways in which the terms are employed. In the first place thought is used broadly, not to say loosely. Everything that comes to mind, that "goes through our heads," is called a thought. To think of a thing is just to be conscious of it in any way whatsoever. Second, the term is restricted by excluding whatever is directly presented; w