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Chapter 26—Methods of Teaching
For centuries education has had to do chiefly with the memory.
This faculty of the mind has been taxed to the utmost, while the other
mental powers have not been correspondingly developed. Students
have spent their time 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, people need only to develop that which is
within them. Such education leads students to self-sufficiency, thus
cutting them off from the source of true knowledge and power.
The education that consists in the training of the memory tends
to discourage independent thought, and has a moral bearing that
is too little appreciated. As students sacrifice the power to reason
and judge for themselves, they become incapable of discriminating
between truth and error, and fall an easy prey to deception. They are
easily led to follow tradition and custom.
It is a fact widely ignored, though never without danger, that
error rarely appears for what it really is. It is by mingling with or
attaching itself to truth that it gains acceptance. The eating of the tree
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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 on the judgment of others
is certain, sooner or later, to be misled.
Only through individual dependence upon God can we possess
the power to discriminate between right and wrong. Each person is
to learn from Him through His Word. Our reasoning powers were
given us to use, and God desires them to be exercised. “Come now,
and let us reason together” (
Isaiah 1:18
), He invites us. In reliance
upon Him we may have wisdom to “refuse the evil and choose the
good.”
Isaiah 7:15
;
James 1:5
.
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