n task is prospective, and where retrospect--and all knowledge
as distinct from thought is retrospect--is of value in the solidity,
security, and fertility it affords our dealings with the future.

1 It is most important for the practice of science that men in many
cases can calculate the degree of probability and the amount of probable
error involved, but that does alter the features of the situation as
described. It refines them.

Chapter Twelve: Thinking in Education

1. The Essentials of Method. No one doubts, theoretically, the
importance of fostering in school good habits of thinking. But apart
from the fact that the acknowledgment is not so great in practice as in
theory, there is not adequate theoretical recognition that all which the
school can or need do for pupils, so far as their minds are concerned
(that is, leaving out certain specialized muscular abilities), is to
develop their ability to think. The parceling out of instruction
among various ends such as acquisition of skill (in reading, spelling,
writing, drawing, reciting); acquiring information (in history and
geography), and training of thinking is a measure of the ineffective way
in which we accomplish all three. Thinking which is not connected with
increase of efficiency in action, and with learning more about ourselves
and the world in which we live, has something the matter with it just
as thought (See ante, p. 147). And skill obtained apart from thinking is
not connected with any sense of the purposes for which it is to be used.
It consequently leaves a man at the mercy of his routine habits and of
the authoritative control of others, who know what they are about and
who are not especially scrupulous as to their means of achievement.
And information severed from thoughtful action is dead, a mind-crushing
load. Since it simulates knowledge and thereby develops the poison of
conceit, it is a most powerful obstacle to further growth in the grace
of intelligence. The sole direct path to enduring improvement in the
methods of instruction and learning consists in centering upon the
conditions which exact, promote, and test thinking. Thinking is the
method of intelligent learning, of learning that employs and rewards
mind. We speak, legitimately enough, about the method of thinking, but
the important thing to bear in mind about method is that thinking is
method, the method of intelligent experience in the course which it
takes.

I. The initial