# How to Learn Easily/Chapter 5

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CHAPTER V IS YOUR "THINKER" IN ORDER?
The ordinary supposition among educators as well as among the business-men of the world is that the "thinker" of the average student is not in order. This, we all "take" it, is one of the deepest of the objections to the present educational system—that it does not teach students to think for themselves. A truly educated man knows how to think, and, moreover, he has the process habituated and, therefore, in easy action. It is said with truth that the present school system does not educate as yet in this sense at all. As a school-boy said to Sir Gilbert Parker, "I am sick of information; I'd like to think a bit, but I haven't time. It's stuff me with things I learn to-day and forget to-morrow." Compare with this remark of a gamin in London that of Professor John Dewey, of Columbia University:—
"Any examination of the prevailing modes of ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/165 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/166 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/167 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/168 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/169 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/170 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/171 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/172 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/173 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/174 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/175 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/176 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/177 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/178 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/179 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/180 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/181 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/182 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/183 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/184 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/185 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/186 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/187 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/188 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/189 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/190 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/191 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/192 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/193 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/194 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/195 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/196 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/197 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/198 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/199 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/200 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/201 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/202 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/203 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/204 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/205 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/206 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/207 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/208 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/209 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/210 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/211 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/212 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/213 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/214 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/215 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/216 ​Page:How To Learn Easily (Dearborn).djvu/217 ​quality is at its highest, and this is particularly true of creative work—thought in its broadest sense.
For the integration of our thinking in a broad way and for making our opinions and ideas at once more coherent, more intensive, and more conscious, no method exceeds in usefulness that of writing definite articles or essays, each with some topic-title not too narrow. Obviously for learning purposes this is the often-hated "composition" of our early school-life—hated oftentimes just because its writing involved the completion of a certain definite amount of real mental activity in a definite time. This is a kind of debt to our education which may not be, like "Micawber's" note-debts, paid always with other notes, other promises to do. Writing, as Francis Bacon reminds us, "maketh an exact man," but writing, too, makes a boy or girl, as well as a man, not only consciously aware of what is known and thought in his more or less hidden mind, but makes that more precise and its relations round about more real. And also more numerous. In other words, writing much on set topics not too narrow, clarifies and extends our ideas and makes them also more dynamic. Nothing else, unless it be active oral debate, can do this either so economically or so well.