Chapter 26—Methods of Teaching
“To give prudence to the simple, to the young man knowledge and
discretion.”
For ages education has had to do chiefly with the memory. This
faculty has been taxed to the utmost, while the other mental powers
have not been correspondingly developed. Students have spent their
time in laboriously crowding the mind with knowledge, very little of
which could be utilized. The mind thus burdened with that which it
cannot digest and assimilate is weakened; it becomes incapable of
vigorous, self-reliant effort, and is content to depend on the judgment
and perception of others.
Seeing the evils of this method, some have gone to another extreme.
In their view, man needs only to develop that which is within him.
Such education leads the student to self-sufficiency, thus cutting him
off from the source of true knowledge and power.
The education that consists in the training of the memory, tending
to discourage independent thought, has a moral bearing which is too
little appreciated. As the student sacrifices the power to reason and
judge for himself, he becomes incapable of discriminating between
truth and error, and falls an easy prey to deception. He is easily led to
follow tradition and custom.
It is a fact widely ignored, though never without danger, that error
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rarely appears for what it really is. It is by mingling with or attach-
ing itself to truth that it gains acceptance. The eating of the tree of
knowledge of good and evil caused the ruin of our first parents, and
the acceptance of a mingling of good and evil is the ruin of men and
women today. The mind that depends upon the judgment of others is
certain, sooner or later, to be misled.
The power to discriminate between right and wrong we can possess
only through individual dependence upon God. Each for himself is to
learn from Him through His word. Our reasoning powers were given
us for use, and God desires them to be exercised. “Come now, and let
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