Excessive reliance upon others for data (whether got
from reading or listening) is to be depreciated. Most
objectionable of all is the probability that others, the book or
the teacher, will supply solutions ready-made, instead of giving
material that the student has to adapt and apply to the question
in hand for himself.
There is no inconsistency in saying that in schools there is
usually both too much and too little information supplied by
others. The accumulation and acquisition of information for
purposes of reproduction in recitation and examination is made
too much of. "Knowledge," in the sense of information, means the
working capital, the indispensable resources, of further inquiry;
of finding out, or learning, more things. Frequently it is
treated as an end itself, and then the goal becomes to heap it up
and display it when called for. This static, cold-storage ideal
of knowledge is inimical to educative development. It not only
lets occasions for thinking go unused, but it swamps thinking.
No one could construct a house on ground cluttered with
miscellaneous junk. Pupils who have stored their "minds" with
all kinds of material which they have never put to intellectual
uses are sure to be hampered when they try to think. They have
no practice in selecting what is appropriate, and no criterion to
go by; everything is on the same dead static level. On the other
hand, it is quite open to question whether, if information
actually functioned in experience through use in application to
the student's own purposes, there would not be need of more
varied resources in books, pictures, and talks than are usually
at command.
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