p. 519 | Value of Co-Work

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Aug 27, 1885

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 11, No. 33.

Value of Co-Work.

DR. ARNOLD, of Rugby, said of the comparative worth of a scholar's co-work in the teaching process, that "the effort a boy makes is a hundred times more valuable to him than the knowledge acquired as the result of the effort." In the same line, Herbert Spencer adds: "The child should be taught as little as possible, and induced to discover as much as possible." As to the absolute necessity of the scholar's co-work to complete the teaching process, Professor Hart says: "The knowledge [you have laid before them] is really not theirs until they have reproduced it and given it expression. . . . They do not grasp it with a clear and lasting apprehension until they have expressed it in language. This is one of the laws of mental action. We fix a thing in our minds by communicating it to another; we make it plain to ourselves by the very effort to give it explanation. Or, to state the matter still more paradoxically, we learn a thing by telling it to somebody; we keep it by giving it away." Dr. Bushnell phrased this same truth bluntly, in the words: "We never know a thing until we have said it." And Professor Edward Olney has quaintly suggested that the mind of a child is best opened by way of his mouth. "You cannot fill a bottle with a cork in," he says. Counting every passive hearer as a corked bottle, he adds: "You may pour your stream of knowledge upon them till you drown them, or till they run away, and not get a drop of it into them, because their mouths are shut." The co-work of the scholar, in both thinking and speaking, is an essential element in the teaching process.

It is true that there is a difference of opinion, among educators, as to the relative value of the class-recitation system, and of the lecture system, in the teaching of advanced scholars in our colleges and universities; but the most zealous advocate of the lecture system would never claim that the lecturer could impart instruction to a body of purely passive hearers. The idea of the lecture system in the realm of secular education, presupposes the readiness of all the hearers to make an intelligent effort at acquiring the knowledge which the lecturer proffers. In this effort, the taking of notes, and the submitting to a subsequent examination on the subject of the lecture, commonly play an important part; and always the hearer who is found to have learned most from a lecture is one who has exerted himself in co-work with his teacher in the teaching process by the lecture plan. And this lecture system is advocated by its partisans only for advanced pupils; for those who are already practiced in the habit of intelligent co-work with their teachers in the acquisition of knowledge. Who would think of attempting to teach the alphabet, or the multiplication table, or the rules of grammar, or the spelling and defining of words, by a series of lectures to a group of passive and listless children? Whoever would attempt this, would simply make the mistake that any teacher makes, who acts on the supposition that he can ever teach any truth to any scholar without that scholar's co-work with him.—Teaching and Teachers.