Exposition and illustration in teaching

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CHAPTER TAGrS

I. Nature and Scope of Exposition and Illustration 1

III. Mental Activity 65

CHAPTER I Nature and Scope of Exposition and Illustration

Applying the principles to be laid down in what follows, it is well to make a beginning in some region of knowledge that is common to all intelligent educated people. A good dictionary may be fairly taken to represent such a region. What the dictionary tells us about Exposition and Illustration will probably be admitted to be common property, and therefore a suitable starting-point for a treatment that will introduce points of view that may be unfamiHar to the reader. In teaching, it is now generally admitted that we ought rather to lead up to a definition than to start from one. In what follows, the definitions as found in the dictionary will not be treated as ends in themselves, but merely as the common basis from which reader and writer may make an intelligible start. This chapter will concern itself not so much with the explanation of the definitions which it borrows from the dictionary as with the elaboration of the connotation of the terms Exposition and Illustration in their relation to teaching.

In Sir James A. H. Murray's ^'New English Diction-

B 1 ary on Historical Principles '* we find under the word expound f the following meanings : —

1. To set forth, declare, state in detail (doctrines, ideas, principles ;

formerly used with wider application).

2. To explain, interpret :

(a) gen. To explain (what is difficult or obscure) ; to state the signification of ; to comment on (a passage or an author) .

(6) esp. To interpret, comment upon (Scripture, religious formularies, etc.) . Now chiefly with reference to homiletic exposition.

We may safely neglect the more literal meanings attached to exposition, such as "putting out of," "exposure," "putting to public view"; just as we need not seriously consider the archaic use in Hudibras: "He expounded both his pockets," or Littre's "putting in the pillory." So far as the teacher is concerned, two of the accepted meanings stand out as of importance: "to set forth" and "to explain or interpret." In the ordinary practice of the schoolroom these two meanings are not usually distinguished from each other, because, as a matter of fact, the purpose of setting forth anything is to explain it to the pupil. If we set a matter clearly before another, we feel that we have explained it. If to a wayfarer we set forth his route, we feel that we have explained a matter about which he was in doubt. A clear statement of the Binomial Theorem is generally regarded as in some sort an explanation of that theorem. There are those who question whether the teacher can und^r any circumstances do more than make just such a presentation. Jacotot, the founder of the "Universal Method" of teaching, is usually true to his reiterated principle that "a teacher is never necessary to man," ^

> Enseignement Universel, p. 304.

but in a moment of unusual generosity he admits that ''a teacher is useful to men, he is necessary to children, but a teacher who explains [uri maitre explicateur] is deadening [abrutissant\J^ ^ The negativeness of the teacher's work from this point of view is obvious. In the words of one of Jacotot's editors: '^In fact, the Founder limits himself to saying: ^Here is a book; learn Latin/ "

But while the two meanings of Exposition — setting forth and explaining — to a certain extent overlap, they imply a real distinction that is worth the teacher's attention. While we are mainly interested in discovering how to present certain matters in the way best suited to render them intelligible to the pupil, we are none the less setting them forth. The first meaning of Exposition, in fact, implies the presentation of new matter, the second the explanation or interpretation of matter already known to, but not yet fully understood by, the pupil. The first meaning, ^^ setting forth," corresponds to what is usually understood in school and college by the verb demonstrate. This word, which literally means to show or point out, has acquired the added connotation of '^for a purpose.'' A demonstrator in a college is not a man who points out merely, but one who shows the meaning of what he points out. As the dictionary has it, he '' exhibits and explains." Still, the fact remains that in both the first meaning of expound and in the general meaning of demonstrate there is the notion of supplying new matter, so that this presentation of new matter may be regarded as an essential part of Exposition, though it need not be found at all stages of Exposition. We shall see when we come

to deal with Illustration that the same distinction arises between the introduction of new matter and the manipulation of old.

It has to be observed that for our present purpose we are treating the subject of Exposition from the point of view of the teacher. It is possible to regard it entirely from the pupil's standpoint. When this is done, Exposition is dealt with as a part of composition, and ranks as coordinate with narration and description. As such it enters into the ordinary school curriculum, and in many cases receives a considerable amount of attention. Naturally the principles of Exposition must remain the same whether practised by the pupil or by the teacher, but the conditions under which the principles are applied in the two cases are so different that a separate treatise is required for each.^

It will be noted that the dictionary lays stress on the fact that the things to be set forth are '^doctrines, ideas, principles," the obvious inference being that Exposition has nothing to do with material things, that we can no more expound a steam engine than we can expound our pockets. But while it is bad English to speak of expounding a locomotive, we may correctly speak of expounding the principles on which the locomotive works. This does not, after all, mean that the concrete is removed from the realm of Exposition, but merely that Exposition can deal with the concrete only in terms of ideas. The contributions of the senses must be taken for granted by the expositor. His business is so to arrange the mental results of sensations that they

^ For a treatment of the subject as a part of the curriculum, see Exposition in Classroom Practice, by Mitchill and Carpenter, the Macmillan Co., New York, 1906.

shall form a well-organised and therefore intelligible whole. From this point of view all Exposition is explanation or interpretation, though in order to complete the explanation it may be necessary to place the pupil in such a position that new matter may be assimilated. Sometimes the expositor can so arrange old matter that it becomes intelligible without the introduction of anything new, but frequently it happens that in the pupil's knowledge there is some link lacking, without which all the present material is necessarily unintelligible. To introduce the missing elements is clearly an essential part of Exposition. I have known a man who had a really excellent knowledge of French completely puzzled by a passage that presented no apparent difficulty. He could make no sense out of it because he did not happen to know that Monsieur, when used absolutely, meant the eldest brother of the king of France.

It is worth remarking that in this connection ^^explanation" has no reference to the ultimate meaning of the matter to be dealt with. It is not a metaphysical term. Accordingly, from the teacher's point of view. Exposition does not include the discovery of the true meaning of the matter to be expounded, but only the setting forth of that matter in such a way as to be intelligible to the pupil. The facts and the explanation of the facts are for the teacher the data of Exposition. He may be misinformed about the materials he is dealing with, his facts may not be facts, his explanations of his facts may not stand the test of investigation, and yet his exposition may be excellent. As an expositor his business is so to present his facts that they shall carry with them the explanation that appeals to him as satisfactory. Too often it has been assumed that an intelHgent mastery of the facts to be presented is enough to quahfy a teacher for his work/ In reahty it is no more than the essential condition of his beginning to learn to apply his art. For our present purpose we shall assume that the teacher has acquired the necessary facts and has mastered their meaning. The problem remains to communicate these facts so that they shall convey to the pupil the meaning the teacher has accepted as the true one.

The teacher may not only adopt a wrong interpretation of the facts, but may know that his interpretation is false, and yet be an excellent expositor. Professor J. W. Allen ^ provides an admirable illustration. Taking the Reformation as subject, he gives three separate expositions of its meaning, one from the Roman Catholic point of view, another from the Protestant, while the third is written from the standpoint of a critical Mercutio who calls for "a, plague o' both your houses. '^ By appropriate overemphasis and compression, each of the accounts, while not inventing incidents or what are commonly called ^^facts,^' contrives to convey an entirely different impression from the others. So far as each is successful, it leaves the mind of the pupil with his ideas of the Reformation reconstructed in a particular way, a way that was first developed in the mind of the expositor, though, as we see, he has adopted at least two other modes of reconstructing the available elements.

^ Cf . De Quincey : " The t6 docendum, the thing to be taught, has availed to obscure or even to annihilate for their eyes every anxiety as to the mode of teaching." Essay on Style. Collected Writings (Masson, 1897), Vol. II, p. 160.

2 The Place of History in Education, 1909, p. 210.

The test of the expositor is: does he produce on the mind of the pupil the impression he desires to produce ? Literary style is sometimes tested by the clearness with which it conveys the author's meaning. But sometimes the author may not desire that his meaning should be understood. He may want his words to convey one meaning to one set of readers and another to another. From this point of view the test is: does he convey the meaning to each that he intended to convey ? Style is not so much a means of making another know what we think, as it is a means of producing a certain effect upon the mind of another. So in the case of the expositor, whether he be honest or dishonest, the result of successful exposition must be that there now exists in the mind of the hearer or reader a combination of mental elements that previously existed in the mind of the expositor. There may be many other ways in which the elements could be combined, and these possible combinations may all have been formed at one time or other in the mind of the expositor, but if he has succeeded in his present work, only one of these combinations is able to establish itself in the mind of the person he is dealing with. Exposition, therefore, comes to be, in the ultimate resort, the manipulation of the ideas of another.

This gives a more definite meaning to the term explanation as used by the teacher. Some people do not see how things can be explained. They admit the advantage of statement and demonstration, but cannot see how something that has been stated and demonstrated can be made clearer by writing or talking about it. They quote the case of the little girl who has won the good-will of all the teachers' common rooms in the world by her protest that she thought she could understand her arithmetic if only her mother would give up explaining it/ In his Modern Painters, Ruskin tells us bluntly: ^^Explanations are wasted time. A man who can see, understands a touch; a man who cannot, misunderstands an oration." The contrast between a touch and an oration is not very happy, as it might be held to imply a comparison between two different kinds of explanation — practical and verbal. But even if we limit the contrast to the cognate terms, a word and an oration, we have still the implied admission that the word has done some good. In actual experience it is often found that only a word is needed to estabHsh the proper relation among a group of ideas that need nothing but the help of this word to reduce themselves to a combination intelligible to a person who otherwise is unable to understand them. It is quite possible for a man to have in his mind all the facts necessary to explain something that he does not understand, and yet be quite unable to make the necessary application of his knowledge. The facts must be put in a certain order before the true relation can be seen, and it is the business of the expositor, by means of words or otherwise, to arrange them in this order.

One of the great difficulties at certain examinations is to keep candidates from getting just this kind of help from each other. A difficult problem in Perspective or in Orthographic Projection often becomes quite easy to a candidate from a single glance at his neigh-

^ In his Charles Dickens, Mr. G. K. Chesterton says: Dickens "had one most unfortunate habit, a habit that often put him in the wrong, even when he happened to be in the right. He had an incurable habit of explaining himself."

bour's completed drawing, though without that glance he could make no sense out of the problem as stated in words on his examination paper. He has all the knowledge needed to work out the problem, but he lacks the power of making the initial combination. At a certain examination in Applied Mathematics an industrious but not very original student found herself unable to understand a particular question on her paper till she chanced to see a fellow-candidate twirling her finger in a particular way. The motion of the finger at once suggested the idea of a left-handed helix, and the point of the question became plain. Both candidates happened to be considering the same problem at the time, but there was no intentional signalling. The clever candidate did not know that she had helped the other. It has to be remembered that unless the duller student had had the necessary materials in her mind, no amount of finger-twirling would have been of the slightest use to her.

In a similar way an uninteUigent plumber has often in his mind all the facts that are necessary to the mastery of a difficult job in a house, and is yet unable to apply his knowledge. The householder makes several suggestions, most of them futile, but happens to hit upon one combination that appeals to the practical but unintelligent workman, who then exclaims, ^^Ah, now that you put it that way — , '^ and proceeds to carry out a suggestion that he could not originate. In a certain sense the ignorant householder has explained matters to the plumber. What the householder has done more or less by chance, the skilful expositor must do deliberately.

Exposition may well be described as a bipolar process. For our own ends we may regard it now from the point of view of the expositor, and now from that of the person to whom something is being expounded. But the process is working from both sides all the time. It is interesting to note that at the present moment psychologists are feeling keenly the need for double terms in the case of similar bipolar processes.^ In suggestion and imitation, for example, we have the two poles of the process and a term to describe only one of them. Suggester and imitator are words that stand for the persons who suggest or imitate; but we have no terms to denote those who are imitated or to whom suggestion is made. In the books we find rather clumsy references to the subject, the patient, the pattern, the model. Sometimes it is proposed to follow certain analogies and boldly introduce the two terms, suggestee and imitatee. But apart from the barbarous sound of expositee or expositatee, there is the serious objection that this form overemphasises the passive element. The person to whom an exposition is being made is to a certain extent more passive than is the expositor, but he is far from being quite passive. He is guided by the expositor, and to that extent plays a passive part, but if the exposition is to be successful, the person to whom the expositor appeals must bestir himself, and react vigorously on the material supplied by the expositor.

In what follows we shall have to make constant reference to ^'the person to whom the exposition is to be made," and it is obvious that this cumbrous periphrasis cannot be repeated on every occasion. So with 'Hhe matter to be expounded." In both cases

* Cf. Mr. W. Macdougall's Social Psychology, p. 325.

we require a technical term. With regard to the matter to be expounded, we seem to have a word to our hand. Sheltering under the authority of De Quincey's use of TO docendum, the thing to be taught, we would suggest the term expositandurrij the thing to be expounded. By dropping the Greek to we render the term a little less formidable, and lose nothing in the way of accuracy. We have seen that no such convenient term suggests itself for the person to whom the exposition is to be made. Probably it will be best to retain the ordinary word pupil. To be sure, the word is not commonly applied to a person who has left school, and we must in these pages apply it on occasion to people of quite mature years and high attainments; but no confusion need arise if we clearly understand that by pupil we shall in this book indicate the person who in the process of Exposition occupies the pole that is the correlate of the expositor-pole. After all, a learned professor receiving instruction from a street urchin how to find his way back to his hotel is, for the time being, a pupil.

Our first business in preparing this ordinary term pupil for our use is to get rid of the lingering notion that it represents a purely passive side of the process of learning. It connotes rather that the person is being directed in his activities than that he ceases to be active. We are prone to regard listening as in itself a passive matter. The audience is conspicuously passive, while the lecturer or preacher is as conspicuously active. Preaching has, in fact, been defined as '^an animated dialogue with one part left out." But this part that is left out as spoken word must certainly be suppHed as inner thought all through the sermon; else the preaching is a complete failure. The difference between teaching and lecturing lies just here. No fault is more common among inexperienced teachers than the tendency to do all the talking, and to treat the pupils as mere sleeping partners in the work of the class. '^Too much of a lecture'' is the hardest worked cliche in the Normal master's repertory of critical phrases/ In class work the one part must not be left out. There must be give and take ; the pupils must be allowed not only to be active, but to show their activity. In Exposition the teacher may work either by the way of open dialectic, the rapid interchange of question and answer, or by the more sedate methods of the lecture. The important point to note is that the pupil must be equally active in either case. The psychology of listening has not been sufficiently considered by teachers.

To begin with, we are inclined to regard listening as more continuous than it really is. Psychologists are laying more and more stress on the rhythmic element in the phenomena in which they are interested. Nowhere is this rhythmic element more prominent than in listening, especially when long periods are considered. Trained listeners, such as students who have reached the postgraduate stage, are able to listen with a fair degree of continuity throughout an hour's discourse;

^ It is interesting to note that in England the inevitable reaction has come. So thoroughly have students in training been drilled into a distrust of lecturing that they are now said to be losing the power of sustained speech. "Few of our recently trained teachers," says Professor Mark Wright, " can make a well-arranged verbal presentation to a class for ten minutes, without asking questions." It would certainly be a pity if teachers lost the power of consecutive presentation, but of the two the loss of this power of lecturing would be much less serious than the loss of the power of conducting class work on the Hues of a vigorous dialectic. Fortunately, in America, there is little danger of the loss of sustained speech.

but your ordinary amateur listener, say the man who confines himself to a sermon a week and an occasional popular lecture, hears only in patches. Salient points in the discourse stand out, but each of these is a point of departure for trains of thought not bargained for by the speaker. The untrained listener rushes off from each salient point — and often from points that are not at all salient from the speaker's point of view — in a direction determined by the acquired content of his own mind, and he is recalled only by the emergence of another point in the lecture that catches his wandering attention.

Fortunately, what is true in interstitial vision is true here. Just as the mind fills in a great many of the gaps that occur in actual vision, so it fills in a great many gaps that occur in the hearing of a discourse. Even dull people who are in earnest about the sermon go away with some fairly complete general idea of the whole (it is taken for granted that there is a general idea underlying the whole), but in many cases, no doubt, even after honest attention, the inexperienced listener goes away with only one or two prominent points, which are not by any means necessarily points in the main line ,of thought, but are more likely to be prominent points of illustration.

A training in the art of listening is therefore an important part of Exposition. Unless the expositor can assure himself that his pupils are doing their share of the work, he must be very doubtful about his success. In class-teaching he will, of course, seize every opportunity of making the pupils take an overt share in the work; but in the case of a more or less formal lecture this is difficult, sometimes, indeed, impossible; so the lecturer must do what he can to encourage the pupils to test their powers of continuous attention. An excellent test that they can themselves apply is to see how far they can anticipate what is coming. Certain lecturers resent such a test. I have known one quite lose his temper when this matter was brought before him. He did not put it that way, but his view obviously was that nobody could anticipate what he was going to say in any of his lectures. But the test implies no challenge of the lecturer's originality. No doubt at the very beginning of an isolated lecture by an unknown person, one cannot usually anticipate what is coming, and, further, at many points in the lecture one may be quite unable to guess what is coming next. But in an ordinary lecture or sermon the experienced listener is generally able to anticipate a great deal of what is coming. When a halting speaker hesitates for a word, there are usually scores of his hearers who have already supplied it.

What the psychologist points out to us in our ordinary reading of a book or newspaper is true in our listening. In almost every case the incidence of attention is not on the word that occupies the centre of the field of vision.^ So in music we are familiar with the fact that the performer's eye is frequently bars ahead of the note he is actually striking, and in certain familiar combinations the conclusion of a passage seems to come of its own accord, even when the notes are not seen at

^ Dealing with reading aloud, Mr. E. V. Lucas, in The Avthor for July, 1909, writes the suggestive words: "Lacking the needful power of seeing two lines ahead (as John Roberts used to see two cannons ahead), I am continually falling into wrong stresses and misunderstandings, which annoy me like little stings."

all ; that is to say, certain common endings will be played quite naturally by the performer, even if the notes oc- (cur on the page that has not yet been exposed. We are too apt to assume that our reading and our listening •are matters of word by word understanding. Our thinking is not carried on in this atomistic way. We work with much bigger units than the individual word or sound. We can never know the present except in relation to the past and the future. In the stream of thoughts that pass through our minds the present thought is the darkest in the whole series : —

"The knowledge of some other part of the stream, past or future, near or remote, is always mixed in with our knowledge of the present thing." ^

When Shakespeare and Shelley agree in selecting as man's high prerogative the power of ^ booking before and after," they are building on a sound psychological foundation. The present can be understood only by reference to the past and the future.

In listening, the pupil should always be using the past to anticipate the future. The beginning and ending of good listening is anticipation — being able to project ourselves towards the point up to which the lecturer is leading. We may not be able to anticipate the lecturer sentence by sentence. It may be that we are unable to complete such a sentence as '^The most optimistic writer on Education is ." Here it is probable that very few could add the missing word in the sentence as it thus occurs out of the blue. But suppose this sentence occurs in the middle of a lecture, a good lecture — that is, a lecture that has been thought

* W, James: Principles of Psychology, VoL I, p. 606.

out and organised — there would have been in all probability indications by the help of^ which an experienced listener could infer at least the category under which the individual name is to be found. So far from being a reflection on the lecturer's originality, it is the highest compliment to him that his audience should be able to anticipate, within limits, what is coming. It is your careless, unprepared, unmethodical man who says the unexpected things. For remember, even with a professional dealer in paradoxes, it is quite possible, by the rule of contraries, or in extreme cases, when that rule fails, by the rule of contra-contraries, to anticipate what he is going to say. In other words, an organised lecture has a style underlying it that is all in the whole and all in every part, and that style can be surprised by a sympathetic listener. A merely capricious lecture, on the other hand, has nothing by which its development may be followed.

Note further that the essential thing is not so much that the pupil is to be able to anticipate the very points to be raised, and how they will be settled, as that he must adopt the anticipative attitude. The pupil-mind must be feeling its own way into the problems that are being dealt with, and must keep on asking itself questions about the possibilities of the case. It may be thought that this stretching out of the mind towards what is to come will render it oblivious to what has gone before, that it will be so busy with the future as to lose sight of the past. On the contrary, it is only by relying upon the past that the mind has any chance of anticipating the future. The really active mind is playing all round the subject it is examining, and from what has been already presented, it gets all manner of impulses urging it to make tentative advances in this direction and in that. Each advance is not only suggested by what has gone before, but must be tested by its consistency with the facts that have suggested it. Assuming that the ultimate purpose of Exposition is to cause to arise in the mind of the pupil a combination of ideas exactly corresponding to a combination already formed in the mind of the expositor, it is clearly of the first importance to find out what means are at our disposal to bring about this combination in the pupil's mind. This demands a study of the nature of ideas and the laws according to which they act. But before entering upon details, it is well to get a general view of the whole ground. In ordinary language we use the word Illustration as meaning the clearing up of something that is in itself obscure. This idea we found to underlie also the meaning of Exposition. In point of fact, there is a certain confusion in the popular use of these two terms, a confusion that has a good deal to justify it in the usage of capable writers. Appealing, as in the case of the term Exposition, to the disinterested verdict of the dictionary, and, in order to widen our outlook, selecting an American lexicographer, we find that Webster thus delivers himself on the meanings of the verb to illustrate : —