Hence the first approach to any subject in school, if thought is
to be aroused and not words acquired, should be as unscholastic
as possible. To realize what an experience, or empirical
situation, means, we have to call to mind the sort of situation
that presents itself outside of school; the sort of occupations
that interest and engage activity in ordinary life. And careful
inspection of methods which are permanently successful in formal
education, whether in arithmetic or learning to read, or studying
geography, or learning physics or a foreign language, will reveal
that they depend for their efficiency upon the fact that they go
back to the type of the situation which causes reflection out of
school in ordinary life. They give the pupils something to do,
not something to learn; and the doing is of such a nature as to
demand thinking, or the intentional noting of connections;
learning naturally results.
That the situation should be of such a nature as to arouse
thinking means of course that it should suggest something to do
which is not either routine or capricious--something, in other
words, presenting what is new (and hence uncertain or
problematic) and yet sufficiently connected with existing habits
to call out an effective response. An effective response means
one which accomplishes a perceptible result, in distinction from
a purely haphazard activity, where the consequences cannot be
mentally connected with what is done.
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