Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals
Learning the facts of another system will in no wise help it to stay in
the mind, for the simple reason that it has no 'cues' within that other
system.
We see examples of this on every hand. Most men have a good memory for
facts connected with their own pursuits. A college athlete, who remains
a dunce at his books, may amaze you by his knowledge of the 'records' at
various feats and games, and prove himself a walking dictionary of
sporting statistics. The reason is that he is constantly going over
these things in his mind, and comparing and making series of them. They
form for him, not so many odd facts, but a concept-system, so they
stick. So the merchant remembers prices, the politician other
politicians' speeches and votes, with a copiousness which astonishes
outsiders, but which the amount of thinking they bestow on these
subjects easily explains.
The great memory for facts which a Darwin or a Spencer reveal in their
books is not incompatible with the possession on their part of a mind
with only a middling degree of physiological retentiveness. Let a man
early in life set himself the task of verifying such a theory as that of
evolution, and facts will soon cluster and cling to him like grapes to
their stem. Their relations to the theory will hold them fast; and, the
more of these the mind is able to discern, the greater the erudition
will become. Meanwhile the theorist may have little, if any, desultory
memory. Unutilizable facts may be unnoted by him, and forgotten as soon
as heard. An ignorance almost as encyclopedic as his erudition may
coexist with the latter, and hide, as it were, within the interstices of
its web. Those of you who have had much to do with scholars and
_savants_ will readily think of examples of the class of mind I mean.
The best possible sort of system into which to weave an object,
mentally, is a _rational_ system, or what is called a 'science.' Place
the thing in its pigeon-hole in a classificatory series; explain it
logically by its causes, and deduce from it its necessary effects; find
out of what natural law it is an instance,--and you then know it in the
best of all possible ways. A 'science' is thus the greatest of
labor-saving contrivances. It relieves the memory of an immense number
of details, replacing, as it does, merely contiguous associations by the
logical ones of identity, similarity, or analogy. If you know a 'law,'
you may discharge your memory of masses of particular instances, for the
law will reproduce them for you whenever you require them. The law of
refraction, for example: If you know that, you can with a pencil and a
bit of paper immediately discern how a convex lens, a concave lens, or a
prism, must severally alter the appearance of an object. But, if you
don't know the general law, you must charge your memory separately with
each of the three kinds of effect.
A 'philosophic' system, in which all things found their rational
explanation and were connected together as causes and effects, would be
the perfect mnemonic system, in which the greatest economy of means
would bring about the greatest richness of results. So that, if we have
poor desultory memories, we can save ourselves by cultivating the
philosophic turn of mind.
There are many artificial systems of mnemonics, some public, some sold
as secrets. They are all so many devices for training us into certain
methodical and stereotyped _ways of thinking_ about the facts we seek to
retain. Even were I competent, I could not here go into these systems in
any detail. But a single example, from a popular system, will show what
I mean. I take the number-alphabet, the great mnemonic device for
recollecting numbers and dates. In this system each digit is
represented by a consonant, thus: 1 is _t_ or _d_; 2, _n_; 3, _m_; 4,
_r_; 5, _l_; 6, _sh, j, ch_, or _g_; 7, _c, k, g_, or _qu_; 8, _f_ or
_v_; 9, _b_ or _p_; 0, _s, c_, or _z_. Suppose, now, you wish to
remember the velocity of sound, 1,142 feet a second: _t, t, r, n_, are
the letters you must use. They make the consonants of _tight run_, and
it would be a 'tight run' for you to keep up such a speed. So 1649, the
date of the execution of Charles I., may be remembered by the word
_sharp_, which recalls the headsman's axe.
Apart from the extreme difficulty of finding words that are appropriate
in this exercise, it is clearly an excessively poor, trivial, and silly
way of 'thinking' about dates; and the way of the historian is much
better. He has a lot of landmark-dates already in his mind. He knows the
historic concatenation of events, and can usually place an event at its
right date in the chronology-table, by thinking of it in a rational way,
referring it to its antecedents, tracing its concomitants and
consequences, and thus ciphering out its date by connecting it with
theirs. The artificial memory-systems, recommending, as they do, such
irrational methods of thinking, are only to be recommended for the first
landmarks in a system, or for such purely detached facts as enjoy no
rational connection with the rest of our ideas. Thus the student of
physics may remember the order of the spectral colours by the word
_vibgyor_ which their initial letters make. The student of anatomy may
remember the position of the Mitral valve on the Left side of the heart
by thinking that L.M. stands also for 'long meter' in the hymn-books.
You now see why 'cramming' must be so poor a mode of study. Cramming
seeks to stamp things in by intense application immediately before the
ordeal. But a thing thus learned can form but few associations. On the
other hand, the same thing recurring on different days, in different
contexts, read, recited on, referred to again and again, related to
other things and reviewed, gets well wrought into the mental structure.
This is the reason why you should enforce on your pupils habits of
continuous application. There is no moral turpitude in cramming. It
would be the best, because the most economical, mode of study if it led
to the results desired. But it does not, and your older pupils can
readily be made to see the reason why.
It follows also, from what has been said, that _the popular idea that
'the Memory,' in the sense of a general elementary faculty, can be
improved by training, is a great mistake_. Your memory for facts of a
certain class can be improved very much by training in that class of
facts, because the incoming new fact will then find all sorts of
analogues and associates already there, and these will keep it liable to
recall. But other kinds of fact will reap none of that benefit, and,
unless one have been also trained and versed in _their_ class, will be
at the mercy of the mere crude retentiveness of the individual, which,
as we have seen, is practically a fixed quantity. Nevertheless, one
often hears people say: "A great sin was committed against me in my
youth: my teachers entirely failed to exercise my memory. If they had
only made me learn a lot of things by heart at school, I should not be,
as I am now, forgetful of everything I read and hear." This is a great
mistake: learning poetry by heart will make it easier to learn and
remember other poetry, but nothing else; and so of dates; and so of
chemistry and geography.
But, after what I have said, I am sure you will need no farther argument
on this point; and I therefore pass it by.
But, since it has brought me to speak of learning things by heart, I
think that a general practical remark about verbal memorizing may now
not be out of place. The excesses of old-fashioned verbal memorizing,
and the immense advantages of object-teaching in the earlier stages of
culture, have perhaps led those who philosophize about teaching to an
unduly strong reaction; and learning things by heart is now probably
somewhat too much despised. For, when all is said and done, the fact
remains that verbal material is, on the whole, the handiest and most
useful material in which thinking can be carried on. Abstract
conceptions are far and away the most economical instruments of thought,
and abstract conceptions are fixed and incarnated for us in words.
Statistical inquiry would seem to show that, as men advance in life,
they tend to make less and less use of visual images, and more and more
use of words. One of the first things that Mr. Galton discovered was
that this appeared to be the case with the members of the Royal Society
whom he questioned as to their mental images. I should say, therefore,
that constant exercise in verbal memorizing must still be an
indispensable feature in all sound education. Nothing is more
deplorable than that inarticulate and helpless sort of mind that is
reminded by everything of some quotation, case, or anecdote, which it
cannot now exactly recollect. Nothing, on the other hand, is more
convenient to its possessor, or more delightful to his comrades, than a
mind able, in telling a story, to give the exact words of the dialogue
or to furnish a quotation accurate and complete. In every branch of
study there are happily turned, concise, and handy formulas which in an
incomparable way sum up results. The mind that can retain such formulas
is in so far a superior mind, and the communication of them to the pupil
ought always to be one of the teacher's favorite tasks.
In learning 'by heart,' there are, however, efficient and inefficient
methods; and, by making the pupil skilful in the best method, the
teacher can both interest him and abridge the task. The best method is
of course not to 'hammer in' the sentences, by mere reiteration, but to
analyze them, and think. For example, if the pupil should have to learn
this last sentence, let him first strip out its grammatical core, and
learn, "The best method is not to hammer in, but to analyze," and then
add the amplificative and restrictive clauses, bit by bit, thus: "The
best method is of course not to hammer in _the sentences_, but to
analyze _them and think_." Then finally insert the words '_by mere
reiteration_,' and the sentence is complete, and both better understood
and quicker remembered than by a more purely mechanical method.
* * * * *
In conclusion, I must say a word about the contributions to
our knowledge of memory which have recently come from the
laboratory-psychologists. Many of the enthusiasts for scientific or
brass-instrument child-study are taking accurate measurements of
children's elementary faculties, and among these what we may call
_immediate memory_ admits of easy measurement. All we need do is to
exhibit to the child a series of letters, syllables, figures, pictures,
or what-not, at intervals of one, two, three, or more seconds, or to
sound a similar series of names at the same intervals, within his
hearing, and then see how completely he can reproduce the list, either
directly, or after an interval of ten, twenty, or sixty seconds, or some
longer space of time. According to the results of this exercise, the
pupils may be rated in a memory-scale; and some persons go so far as to
think that the teacher should modify her treatment of the child
according to the strength or feebleness of its faculty as thus made
known.
Now I can only repeat here what I said to you when treating of
attention: man is too complex a being for light to be thrown on his real
efficiency by measuring any one mental faculty taken apart from its
consensus in the working whole. Such an exercise as this, dealing with
incoherent and insipid objects, with no logical connection with each
other, or practical significance outside of the 'test,' is an exercise
the like of which in real life we are hardly ever called upon to
perform. In real life, our memory is always used in the service of some
interest: we remember things which we care for or which are associated