OBSERVATION.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 23 August 1924, Page 15

OBSERVATION.

PRESERVATION OF RELEVANT VALUES. DISCURSIVE EDUCATION DEPRECATED. At the. Wellington Training College Professor Adams addressed the students on “Observation’’ (reports the Dominion). Dr. Adams is academically unorthodox, and has a racily humorous delivery, making weighty points largely by inference. The old notion of observation, fie said, was that the o'oservant person noticed everything he passed, but such a person was merely gaping, as a townsman did when he first visited the country, or vice versa. The modern conception of observation was that it should be confined to subjects of relevance and importance to the observer. Asked how many buttons were on their waistcoats, a class of boys of twelve years of age were 60 per cent, wrong in their answers. At 17 years of age, when dress began to claim their attention, they would probably know the answer correctly. But was it of importance that they should, any more than that they should be able to say how many cows would be standing up or lying down-in a field? There was all the difference in the world between subjective and objective matters, the former applying directly to the person concerned, and the latter to other people, things that counted and things that did not count. Jf he were convinced that his bacon and eggs were bad, and everybody else at the table said they were good, .thej’ would be subjectively bad, and objectively good. One saw the stars in the sky as objective stars, but if lie ran against a bough and bumped his head lie saw another kind of stars that were subjective. To a commercial traveller wagering upon the number of cows lying down, they became subjective cows. To the man who could sing O natural without a tuning fork it cvas subjective; to the rest of the class who could tell it was C natural when the tuning fork was put on the table it was objective. It was a great mistake in education to strive after the discursive and objective point of view, as people were very liable to be led away by the varying opinions of others from time to time. “I would like,” said Dr. Adams, “to see a new instrument devised, something like a thermometer, which I would call a. plirenonieter, and which could be used with advantage in ordinary teaching in schools. I would call the lower scale, like the freezing point in the thermometer, the observation zone, the state of things where reason is unnecessary, and happenings are instinctively deduced from facts. The highest zone, like the boiling point in the thermometer, I would call the gaping zone. Let me illustrate what I mean. A doctor comes to visit a patient, and does very little beyond promising to come to see him the next day, and giving him a white powder which he knows will do him no harm. The doctor knows the patient has influenza. He has all the symptoms. Next day the patient is pink. That disquiets the doctor, because his face was pale the day before, and it has no right to be pink the next day in the case of diagnosed influenza. The third day, worse still, the patient is of an orange colour. The doctor is non-committal, but calls in McKenzie, a second opinion. The fourth day the patient is blue, so the doctor calls in a third opinion, that of McTavish, tly? noted chromatic specialist, hut, alas, on the next day the patient is a, sickly green, and the three doctors go off to a room and come to a decision, which is not for publication. They have reached the very important point where they do not know -what to think next. They have reached even the point where they do not know what questions to ask the patient. They have reached the gaping point. When you have reached the gaping point, the question is what to do. The answer is ‘Gape.’ In real life, and very often in teaching, we come to the gaping pout. The gaping point of a teacher is very much higher than that of his pupils, who reach it much sooner, and deserve some consideration. “Teachers must be careful to observe the gaping point in nupils. If you are dealing with a class, change the subject, and come back to it when ideas have come to you. After the mind takes up an attitude to a subject by reason of much concentration to understand it. which prevents understanding. By leaving the subject, and coming back on it with a fresh mind, often the subject is comprehended in a flash. When you reach the gapinopoint, gape only a little while, then take a rest. It is sometime? a source of inspiration when posed in writing an essay to merely go through the mo” uons of writing. A hoy might he asked to write on Timbuetoo. He does not know of Timbuetoo, but if he is pressed to write long' enough he will probably say so. and that is a commencement. it is a sentence. We must bring our pupils from the position of having to *ay something to the point of having something to say.” Di.. Adams concluded with some interesting explanations of the way m which illustrations from quite general reading would c-ome to the speaker whose mind was barren of ideas upon some over-studied matter, and said t.iat manv of the mystical and theo.sophical phenomena were capable of quite a simple explanation. A man might feel he wa.s just going to meet a gill he had not seen or thought, of in years, just because his sub-conscious mind had unknowingly noted in the hail the silver handle of an umbrella he gave her years before, and the manager oi a gasworks, tired out after a busy day. might wake with the feeling that there was to be an explosion at a certain hour. The sub-conscious mind had noted the indicator without informing the mind, and had gone on working out the calculation of the time required to produce the catastrophe in its sleep.