III.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN TEACHING AND TRAINING.

These two processes practically run into each other a good deal, but they ought not to be confounded. Training implies more or less of practical application of what one has been taught. One may be taught, for instance, the exact forms of the letters used in writing, so as to know at once by the eye whether the letters are formed correctly or not. But only training and practice will make him a penman. Training refers more to the formation of habits. A child may by reasoning be taught the importance of punctuality in coming to school; but he is trained to the habit of punctuality only by actually coming to school in good time, day after day.

The human machine on which the teacher acts, is in its essential nature different from the material agencies operated on by other engineers. It is, as I have once and again said, a living power, with laws and processes of its own. Constant care, therefore, must be exercised, in the business of education, not to be misled by analogies drawn from the material world. The steam-engine may go over its appointed task, day after day, the whole year round, and yet, at the end of the year, it will have no more tendency to go than before its first trip. Not so the boy. Going begets going. By doing a thing often, he acquires a facility, an inclination, a tendency, a habit of doing it. If a teacher or a parent succeeds in getting a child to do a thing once, it will be easier to get him to do it a second time, and still easier a third time.

A teacher who is wise, when he seeks to bring about any given change in a child, whether it be intellectual or moral, will not ordinarily attempt to produce the change all at once, and by main force. He will not rely upon extravagant promises on the one side, nor upon scolding, threats, and violence on the other. Solomon hits the idea exactly, when he speaks of "leading in the way of righteousness." We must take the young by the hand and lead them. When we have led them over the ground once, let us do it a second time, and then a third time, and so keep on, until we shall have established with them a routine, which they will continue to follow of their own accord, when the guiding hand which first led them is withdrawn. _This is training._

The theory of it is true, not only in regard to things to be done, which is generally admitted, but also in regard to things to be known, which is often ignored if not denied. A boy, we will say, has a repugnance to the study of arithmetic. Perhaps he is particularly dull of comprehension on that subject. We shall not remove that repugnance by railing at him. We shall never make him admire it by expatiating on its beauties. It will not become clear to his comprehension by our pouring upon it all at once a sudden and overpowering blaze of light in the way of explanation. Such a process rather confounds him. Here again let us fall back upon the method of the great Teacher, "Line upon line, precept upon precept." We will first patiently conduct our boy through one of the simplest operations of arithmetic, say, a sum in addition. The next day we will conduct him again through the same process, or through another of the same sort. The steps will gradually become familiar to his mind, then easy, then clear. He learns first the practice of arithmetic, then the rules, then the relations of numbers, then the theory on which the rules and the practice are based, and finally, he hardly knows how, he becomes an arithmetician. He has been trained into a knowledge of the subject.

You wish to teach a young child how to find a word in a dictionary. You give at first, perhaps, a verbal description of the mystery of a dictionary. You will tell him that, in such a book, all the words are arranged according to the letters with which they begin; that all the words beginning with the letter A are in the first part of the book; then those beginning with the letter B, then those beginning with C, and so on; you tell him that all the words beginning with one letter, covering some one or two hundred pages, are again re-arranged among themselves according to the second letter of each word, and then again still further re-arranged according to the third letter in each, and so on to the end. Arouse his utmost attention, and explain the process with the greatest clearness that words can give, and then set him to find a word. See how awkward will be his first attempt, how confused his ideas, how little he has really understood what you have told him. You must repeat your directions patiently, over and over, "line upon line;" you must take him by the hand day after day, and train him into a knowledge of even so apparently simple a thing as finding a word in a dictionary.

While teaching and training are thus distinguishable in theory, in practice they are well nigh inseparable. At least, they never should be separated. Teaching has never done its perfect work, until, by training, the mind has learned to run in accustomed channels, until it sees what is true, and feels what is right, with the clearness, force, and promptitude, which come only from long-continued habit.