I myself prize classes far higher than I do lectures. From my own
experience, a lecture is often a very dangerous method of teaching;
it is apt to engender in the mind of men ungrounded conceit and
sciolism, or the bad habit of knowing about subjects without really
knowing the subject itself. A young man hears an interesting
lecture, and carries away from it doubtless a great many new facts
and results: but he really must not go home fancying himself a much
wiser man; and why? Because he has only heard the lecturer's side
of the story. He has been forced to take the facts and the results
on trust. He has not examined the facts for himself. He has had no
share in the process by which the results were arrived at. In
short, he has not gone into the real scientia, that is, the
"knowing" of the matter. He has gained a certain quantity of
second-hand information: but he has gained nothing in mental
training, nothing in the great "art of learning," the art of finding
out things for himself, and of discerning truth from falsehood. Of
course, where the lecture is a scientific one, illustrated by
diagrams, this defect is not so extreme: but still the lecturer who
shows you experiments, is forced to choose those which shall be
startling and amusing, rather than important; he is seldom or never
able, unless he is a man of at once the deepest science and the most
extraordinary powers of amusing, to give you those experiments in
the proper order which will unfold the subject to you step by step;
and after all, an experiment is worth very little to you, unless you
perform it yourself, ask questions about it, or vary it a little to
solve difficulties which arise in your own mind.
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