Yet we must not fail to make grateful acknowledgment of the services to education rendered by those who lifted the maxim into prominence. How often were pupils expected to learn one thing by doing another. Drawing was advocated because it would improve the penmanship. Silent reading or thought-getting was to be learned by oral reading or thought-giving. The alphabet was taught as if the names of the letters would make the child familiar with the sounds. The idea of number was to be gotten by naming the numbers or imitating the Arabic notation. Facility and accuracy in the use of language were to be acquired from exercises in parsing and analysis. Familiarity with birds, flowers, minerals, chemicals, etc., was to be gained from the learned phraseology of the text-books. Sometimes even the teachers knew very little more than the technical terms. When the great ornithologist, Wilson, visited Princeton College, the professor of natural history scarcely knew a sparrow from a woodpecker. A great change has come over Princeton and all other higher institutions of learning; and the new influence has been felt in our high schools, and even in the grades below.
Whilst cheerfully acknowledging the value of the maxim of Comenius, we should, nevertheless, insist on the difference between a maxim which may regulate our conduct in specific cases and a principle which is an all-controlling guide in operations. Coleridge says, “A maxim is a conclusion upon observation of matters of fact, and is speculative; a principle has truth in itself, and is prospective.” It is always dangerous to generalize upon facts observed in one realm of investigation, and then to allow others to apply these general statements to realms as diverse from the original field of observation as mind or spirit is from matter. The disciples in such cases always manifest the hidden weaknesses in the system of their master. They rush in where he would have feared to tread. They push his language to extremes, from which his deeper insight, broader vision, and larger experience would have caused him to shrink. Comenius framed the maxim from the observation of bodily acts; some seek to apply it to every form of human activity. The original language has been twisted into a statement that sounds paradoxical. “We learn to do by doing.” What can these words mean? If we _can_ do a given thing, what need is there of learning to do that thing. If we cannot do the thing to be learned by the doing of it, how can any doing on our part issue in learning? Evidently the maxim in its modern form, if it is at all valid, must partake of the nature of a paradox, which, though seemingly absurd, is yet true in essence or fact. For the purpose of testing the validity of a paradoxical statement, there is no better way than to ascertain its possible meanings, to eliminate those evidently not intended, and finally to investigate the one or more senses or interpretations that may legitimately be put upon the language. The investigation will, in this instance, reveal the relation existing between doing and the act of learning.