In fact, the inherent limitations of experience are often urged as the sufficient ground for attention to thinking. On the contrary, thinking is often regarded both in philosophic theory and in educational practice as something cut off from experience, and capable of being cultivated in isolation. It ought to be one but unfortunately it is not. This remark may sound like a silly truism. The initial stage of that developing experience which is called thinking is experience.
We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of thinking, but the important thing to bear in mind about method is that thinking is method, the method of intelligent experience in the course which it takes. Thinking is the method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards mind. The sole direct path to enduring improvement in the methods of instruction and learning consists in centering upon the conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking. Since it simulates knowledge and thereby develops the poison of conceit, it is a most powerful obstacle to further growth in the grace of intelligence. And information severed from thoughtful action is dead, a mind-crushing load. It consequently leaves a man at the mercy of his routine habits and of the authoritative control of others, who know what they are about and who are not especially scrupulous as to their means of achievement. And skill obtained apart from thinking is not connected with any sense of the purposes for which it is to be used. Thinking which is not connected with increase of efficiency in action, and with learning more about ourselves and the world in which we live, has something the matter with it just as thought (See ante, p.
The parceling out of instruction among various ends such as acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling, writing, drawing, reciting) acquiring information (in history and geography), and training of thinking is a measure of the ineffective way in which we accomplish all three. But apart from the fact that the acknowledgment is not so great in practice as in theory, there is not adequate theoretical recognition that all which the school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned (that is, leaving out certain specialized muscular abilities), is to develop their ability to think. No one doubts, theoretically, the importance of fostering in school good habits of thinking.
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