Right here the teacher who is an artist finds the opportunity for the display of his highest skill. It is his privilege to direct the flights and the perchings of the youthful mind. He can shape the thoughts and their sequence. He can cause the intellect to move from the reason to its consequence, or in the reverse direction if that be more natural or more appropriate. He can guide the thought from cause to effect, from the whole to the parts, from the general to the particular, from the end to the means, from the design to its execution; or a movement the other way is possible in each of these categories. While thus choosing the direction which thought shall take, he can select the objects upon which it shall tarry. This directing influence he will often exert when he is not aware of it. His own habits of mind will be reflected in the mental life of his pupils. There was profound philosophy in the reply of a gifted author who, when asked by his daughter what she should study, said, “I am more concerned about the teachers under whom you study than about the branches of study which you may select.” Habits of thought depend far more upon the teacher than upon the text-book, upon the quality of the instruction than upon its general content. There is, of course, a difference in the culture value of different branches of study; but a study as valuable as geometry may be pursued in a loose way, whilst branches of much inferior value for developing power to think may be taught and studied by the methods of rigid and exact thought.
In shaping the activity of thought, the artist-teacher makes the mind tarry long enough for clear apprehension, sometimes for thorough comprehension, upon the ideas, judgments, and conclusions which are the framework of a system of thought, but he does not neglect the transitions from one to the other, as if these were of little account or necessarily took care of themselves. The transitions in thought are aided by set phrases and forms of solution. As soon as these are mastered, there develops the tendency to think them as algebraic symbols, which do substitute duty in the absence of that for which they stand. For fear of this, the teacher sometimes fails to drill on them long enough to fix them in the mind,—certainly a radical mistake. Drill is a condition of the highest discipline in the school as well as in the army. The drill-master seeks to habituate the soldier to the word of command, so that he will obey in the face of danger without thinking of the consequences. The drill-master at school seeks to make it second nature for a pupil to go through the logical motions, but not without conscious thought of the process or the consequences. Whenever the learner uses forms of parsing, analysis, or solution, his mind should go through the movements of thought expressed by the language. Ask any ordinary class to give you a noun of the first person; they are almost sure to give you either a noun of the third person or a pronoun of the first person. Dictate a sentence with a noun in the first person, and ask the pupils to parse it in the customary way; in nearly all cases they will parse it as a noun of the third person. Ask them to tell why a personal pronoun is so called; frequently they say because it indicates a person,—a statement quite applicable to other kinds of pronouns. If the logical or customary forms of speech are employed, the stream of thought moves on, the mind often failing to perceive the new truth, or error, or nonsense inherent in the language employed. School-boys have tricks of their own which turn upon this peculiarity in the movement of thought. “Who killed Cain?” is suddenly asked. “Abel,” is the reply generally elicited by the question. Should you say, Nine times seven _is_ or _are_ forty-two? The boy who decides in favor of _is_ or _are_ gets a shock of surprise on being told that the product of nine times seven is not forty-two.