Davidson College, Sept.13 (AP)—“There is a great deal of ignorance in the world, but I rather think that our greater curse is shallow, sporadic, untrained thinking,” declared Dr. W. J. Martin, president of Davidson College, in his opening speech to the student body here this morning.
President Martin asked the question: “What is the chief purpose of a college education?” and answered it: “The main purpose is to train you to think.”
His address was a plea for deep reasoning and the elimination of the superficial.
“If the objective of the institution is not intellectual, it is miscalled a college and had better be known by another name. There are other functions, but this is the central and motivating one,” he declared.
President Martin’s address took to account both the individual student and the educational system. He stressed the importance of reflective reasoning as requisite to knowledge, and the apparent trend of the educational system in high schools and colleges from what he termed “Educational Lock-Step,” which he explained means the grouping of students of the most varied abilities in a class and requiring all to keep the same pace.
This system, he declared “is ruinous to the alert, well-endowed young student through teaching him slovenly habits of work and thought, and equally unfair to the slow worker in demanding more of him than God had given him ability to do.”
The special harmfulness of this, Dr. Martin emphasized, comes when the student reaches the upper years of a college course, when the system of “spoon-feeding” dictates that “lessons” be given, whereas the real need is a “subject” and not disjointed segments.
The “subject method, the speaker said, “demands a much more intimate and personal relation between teacher and student than is attained or is possible under our system of formal classes and class assignments. It is recognized that it is a more expensive education but it is proven, I believe, that it turns out more and better thinker and is worth far more than it costs.”
Speaking of prevalent lack of deep reasoning, President Martin said:
“In some measure, all humans are thinking creatures. Our mental powers and processes are distinctive, but not all humans think clearly, connectedly, nor are they capable of sustained thinking. Their thinking is shallow, superficial, incoherent, short lived. In a loose sense or way we all think or reason, but the hardest, the most painful thing most people can undertake is sustained thought or reasoning.
“Reason is the highest mental process and until you have trained yourself in sustained effort in this process, you have not become educated from the intellectual standpoint. The attainment of proficiency in this is somewhat like learning to plow. Some one may lecture to you in learned terms about the methods and reasons for plowing, but you will never learn to plow unless you plow. . . just so in learning to reason—it is well to be told about the process, to be advised and directed, to learn and even memorize certain facts and laws, but to become thinkers you have got to think and to become reasoners you must practice reasoning.”
President Martin counselled the students to practice reasoning by concentrating their minds upon one subject for an hour at a time in a setting free form interruption and annoyance, and to refrain from too much light intellectual diet outside of what is necessary for diversion and variety.
“You cannot make a good pudding by using a larger measure of seasoning than you do of fruit and flour. Do not clog your mind with trash,” he stated.
From the front page of the Concord Daily Tribune, Sept. 11, 1926
newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1926-09-13/ed-1/seq-1/
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