Thinking About Education, Facts or Principles

1921

Something to Think About
By F. A. Walker

EDISON QUESTIONS

THOMAS A. EDISON, who has a very low opinion of the intellectuality of the average college student, has come out with a new set of questions, historical, political, geographical and scientific.

The Wizard is much too honest a man for anybody to suggest that he deliberately got up these posers for the purpose of humiliating his fellow citizens.

So it may be admitted that the wide ground covered by the queries represents his own interest in all sorts of subjects having to do with human activities.

But it is doubtful whether or not ability to answer correctly all or most of these questions could be any test of the intelligence of anybody, in college or out of it. For intelligence and knowledge are very different things.

It was once said of a distinguished man that he had a larger store of useless knowledge than anybody of his time. Mr. Edison would not admit that any knowledge could be useless.

In fact he seems to take the attitude of the late Lord Macaulay who was in the habit of qualifying a statement as to something that nobody knew anything about but himself, by saying "as every schoolboy knows." As a result "Macaulay's Schoolboy" became the proper definition of an infant prodigy.

Lord Kelvin was one of the most distinguished men of science of his time. Addressing his students at Glasgow University on one occasion he said that the great thing about the higher mathematics was that it could be of no possible use to anybody.

Yet the fact that Kelvin and a couple of his friends, one in America and another in Europe, used to amuse themselves with these useless investigations, is, in a way, an argument in favor of Mr. Edison. It goes to show that certain things are worth while even if no direct advantage is to be derived from them.

Old-fashioned schoolmasters were great believers in the importance of facts, and a great part of their time was passed in getting them into the minds of the young.

But the modern schoolmaster goes about his business in a different way. He does not try to teach facts. He does try to teach general principles. It is like the difference between the old geography and the new.

The old dealt with the names of places, rivers, mountains and so on. The new deals with the effect of the physical shape of the earth's surface on the races scattered over it.

A well-trained lawyer is not one who carries all the cases around with him in his head. But he does know how to put his hand on anything he wants.

In the same way it is more important to be able to get at your facts than to know them.

—Mountain Democrat, Placerville, California, October 29, 1921, page 6.