LEARNING TO LEARN

President Lowell's report offers an abundance of food for thought. His remarks on educational methods, while less startling than other topics, offer some sound suggestions. Concretely, they are a defence of the old method of teaching by problem rather than by precept. "We learn to do by doing," he says. A degree of self-service in education is often of far more value than an equivalent amount of forcible feeding. The course in which a student must work out the answers to questions for himself, instead of learning the answers by rote, has many advantages: it is an agreeable incentive to work, it is perhaps a slower but certainly a surer way to fix facts in the memory; it trains the mind to be an active organ instead of a passive receptacle for knowledge; above all, it fits a man to apply himself to the life he will meet after college, where every step he takes is not so much a lesson to be learned as it is a problem to be solved.

The examples which President Lowell cites--arithmetic, physics, the classic languages--may seem to apply more directly to elementary education. In fact his whole argument is a suggestion for teaching children how to learn, rather than teaching them the objects of that learning. This, one may argue, is the purpose of primary and preparatory education, and should be regarded as a prerequisite, to college. When a student enters college, it might he supposed that he knows how to study, and that college is the place for him to apply such knowledge.

On such an assumption, the lecture system should be self-sufficient and examinations a non-essential. Unfortunately, the theory is far removed from fact. The "average" college man must not only be given a chance to acquire an education; he must be provided a means of acquiring it and a stimulus to its acquisition. Both of these a problem method of instruction provides.