"High School Subjects Self-Taught"

Whenever I return to the home I grew up in, I sift through the shelves and boxes of books that I have so far had to leave behind in my transitions from city to city over the past few years. I recently stumbled upon an old, out-of-print book on self-education: High School Subjects Self-Taught by Louis Copeland, with an introduction by the late mathematics educator William L. Schaaf.

In fact, since I started this blog and began my project of researching and writing about self-education last year, I have started noticing references to self-education - direct and indirect - all over the place. I am beginning to collect these as I find them in the hopes that they might be able to inform the book I am working on.

A few things to notice about the following quotes:

--Learning is presented as a valuable end in itself as well as a means to other ends; schooling is presented as an opportunity for learning.

--The ultimate responsibility for learning rests with the learner himself or herself.

--The learner's motivation and desire to learn is critically important.

--It is never too late to learn: the fact that one's schooling is complete, or one's experiences in school were unsatisfactory, does not mean that the opportunity to get an education has passed. For self-educators, there is always a "second chance" to learn.

---
From William L. Schaaf, "Introduction" and "Suggestions for Studying this Book," in High School Subjects Self-Taught by Louis Copeland:

Modern life and contemporary events make a heavy demand upon the education and resourcefulness of the individual. In dealing successfully with personal, social, and vocational problems, a basic education is an unquestionable asset.

The primary value of an education is not simply the attainment of knowledge, but rather, though ideas as well as information and skills, to develop the power of thinking and to cultivate understanding and appreciation that will serve many purposes. These purposes may concern self-improvement and advancement in your business or vocation; efficient conduct of your household and personal affairs; intelligent consumer activities; adequate participation in civic and community life; helpful guidance where your children are concerned; effective and enjoyable use of your leisure time, devoted to recreation, hobbies, or other avocational pursuits.

Possibly you never had an opportunity to attend High School; or, having begun your studies, you were, for one reason or another, unable to complete them. Perhaps you finished your high school course some years ago, but since graduation you have forgotten a good deal of what you once learned, and have come to appreciate its significance somewhat more fully than you did when you were in school. In any event, you now wish to refresh yourself on many of these matters, and perhaps may even want to strike out in one or two new directions.

One is never too old to learn if one has the desire to do so. It is an accepted fact that, under ordinary circumstances, you can learn just as well at 25 or 30 as you could at 15 years of age; indeed, there are good reasons why you may learn even more effectively as an adult than as an adolescent. To be sure, it isn't always easy to stick to it. There are pressing demands and inevitable distractions - the business of earning a living, the fatigue at the end of the day, the need for relaxation, the desire for recreation. But that is just where your determination comes in; if you want to badly enough, you will be amazed at how much you can learn, even at 40 or more!
...
A moment's reflection will reveal that there are, in all, but a half dozen or so large fields of human learning and achievement into one or another of which virtually all subjects fall. These fields includes: (1) the social studies; (2) language and literature; (3) the fine arts; (4) foreign languages; (5) mathematics; (6) the physical sciences; (7) philosophy and logic; and (8) the practical arts.
...
No matter how great the sacrifice or how considerable the effort in mastering these subjects you will be amply rewarded. No one can ever take your education away from you.
...
Merely reading a book may no more result in learning than listening to a lecture. To learn something requires active effort on your part. You must have a goal. You must know how you are progressing. And above all, you must want to learn.
...
Here are some additional hints on how to study effectively:

1. Try to understand the general scheme of what you are trying to learn. If it is fairly complicated, make an outline of the main terms.
2. Several short periods on successive days are usually better than one lengthy period of study.
3. Use various ways of making yourself think over what you are studying.
4. Try to associate new facts or ideas with something you already know.
5. Form the habit of reviewing mentally every paragraph or section before you go on to the next one. See how much of it you can recall; this will help you to remember it.
6. Sometimes reading aloud helps one to remember material; it is better to read rapidly rather than slowly.
7. When you have to stop studying, interrupt yourself at a logical point, but make note of some cue which will enable you to pick up the thread when you begin again.
8. When you have learned something new, try to make use of it as soon as you can; the oftener the better.
9. When you have completed a reasonable amount of material, take time out to summarize what you have covered. You may want to write out your summary.
10. Always have a good dictionary handy. Make frequent use of it. When you have discovered the meaning of a new word, try to use the word yourself.
...
The important thing is to adopt a plan and then carry it out regularly and faithfully; success is never achieved by good intentions or casual activities.

William L. Schaaf
--From "Introduction" and "Suggestions for Studying this Book," in High School Subjects Self-Taught by Louis Copeland (Garden City Publishing Co., 1946).

The reading habits of Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Where do the allusions, ideas, images, and thought-fragments that populate the mind and the writings of a great thinker come from? We can often find out by consulting a biography:

From John Livingston Lowes' The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination:

How did Coleridge actually read books? Few more significant questions can be asked about any man, and about Coleridge probably none. Coleridge...was reading Maurice, but he was doing more: he was also going back at first hand to the sources of Maurice's information. He made, accordingly, a memorandum of another book to read.

Coleridge (at least during the years of the Note Book) read with an eye which habitually pierced to the secret spring of poetry beneath the crust of fact. And this means that items or details the most unlikely might, through some poetic potentiality discovered or divined, find lodgement in his memory.
...
Coleridge not only read books with minute attention, but he also habitually passed from any book he read to the books to which that book referred. And that, in turn, makes it possible to follow him into the most remote and unsuspected fields. And his gleanings from these fields, transformed but recognizable, will meet us again and again as we proceed. For to follow Coleridge through his reading is to retrace the obliterated vestiges of creation.
...
When Coleridge once started on a book, he was apt to devour it whole.
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We have to do, in a word, with one of the most extraordinary memoires of which there is record, stored with the spoils of an omnivorous reading, and endowed in to the bargain with an almost uncanny power of association.
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Even you and I, at vivid moments, know the sudden leap of widely sundered recollections, through some flash of association, into a new and sometimes startling unity. And that, assuredly in no less degree, is also the experience of poets.

John Livingston Lowes
--The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination

The art of memorization

Memorization gets a bad rap in education circles, but it remains a fact of life for students and adults in many settings: anatomy and other subjects in pre-medical or medical school; "black-letter" legal rules and terminology in law school; dates and locations in undergraduate history survey courses; the names and dates of artworks in art history courses; and vocabulary and grammatical structures in the study of world languages.

In the professional world, there is an acute need to remember names and faces: all of your networking will come to naught if you can't remember anyone's name. And if you are a K-12 teacher, you are expected to learn something like 150 new names within the first week or two of each school year.

It is helpful to approach memorization tasks as challenges requiring a clever solution rather than as pure drudgery.

As a new preservice teacher, I have worked hard to memorize every student's name in my first few encounters with my mentor teacher's classes. The kids noticed my effort, and several complimented me on it - I am convinced that it has helped me build their trust and allowed me to project an image of competence despite my lack of experience. I used several tricks: immediately addressing each student by name, using the seating chart as a crutch when necessary; memorizing names in pairs or rows according to where students sit; repeating the names as often as possible; and frequently testing myself, never allowing myself to glance past students I don't know or get away with not knowing a student's name.

I am also currently taking a survey course in early American history to fulfill a certification requirement. I will be tested later today on my knowledge of the first sixteen Presidents and their years of service:

George Washington (1789-1797); John Adams (1797-1801); Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809); James Madison (1809-1817); James Monroe (1817-1825); John Quincy Adams (1825-1829); Andrew Jackson (1829-1837); Martin Van Buren (1837-1841); William H. Harrison (1841); John Tyler (1841-1845); James K. Polk (1845-1849); Zachary Taylor (1849-1850); Millard Fillmore (1850-1853); Franklin Pierce (1853-1857); James Buchanan (1857-1861); Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865).

One's first instinct when looking at a list like this is to despair - or to fall back on that favorite excuse of students everywhere, demanding to know why one needs to learn this. I saw the list and immediately envisioned myself writing the names and dates over and over again, making flash cards, and in general wasting my time on a very frustrating activity.

But then I thought it through again and devised a strategy that enabled me to memorize the list in less than two hours:

1. Break up the task. I find it especially helpful to break it up "vertically" rather than "horizontally" - rather than memorize three Presidents at a time, memorize all of the Presidents' last names and first initials in order before even looking at the dates.

2. Memorize the last names in pairs and chunks: I had trouble with the second half of this list, so I first solidified my understanding of the first half, then remembered "Tyler-Polk-Taylor" before moving on to "Fillmore-Pierce-Buchanan-Lincoln." I then wrote the list - last names only - out from memory a few times, then waited a day and did it again. The first names are easy and can be picked up gradually as you move through the activity.

3. Having the last names and first initials down pat, I looked at the dreaded dates for the first time. Before banging my head against these, I paused to notice a few things:

-The range of dates is 1789 (NOT 1776), President Washington's inauguration, to 1865, the assassination of President Lincoln.

-Because of the safeguards for Presidential succession built into the Constitution, there has never, ever been a time in the history of the United States since 1789 that we have not had a President. Therefore, you only need to memorize the first date of every pair. The second date of each pair - i.e., the last year of each presidency - is identical to the first year of the next presidency.

-A single presidential term lasts four years; two complete terms last eight years. Are there any Presidents in the list who served less than a single term? There are only three: Harrison (1841), Taylor (1849-1850), and Fillmore (1850-1853). I memorized the length of each of these three short presidencies first.

-Only five of the 16 Presidents on this list served two full terms, so I memorized these five: Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson.

And that is all the information you need to memorize to complete the list! The list begins with Washington in 1789 - he served two terms, so you add eight years to get (1789-1797) - and so on.

It's a lot more fun and sensible than flash cards.