Teaching Johnny to Think by Leonard Peikoff

Author:Leonard Peikoff [Peikoff, Leonard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ayn Rand Institute Press
Published: 2014-03-16T06:00:00+00:00

Sequence and Structure

Any process of thinking or teaching has to proceed step-by-step. It should be like a good movie or novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It has to start with something that the students can grasp by itself, something that does not require still another explanation, something that is self-intelligible to these particular students. That is the equivalent of an axiom in cognition: it is a beginning. You have to build on this, follow it step-by-step, and culminate in a conclusion.

Many people go wrong by not grasping the role of structure. There are countless points that can be completely clear, if presented in the right sequence, with the right background and the necessary preparation. These same points become unintelligible if given out of sequence, even though you give exactly the same point with the same illustrations and the same arguments. Therefore, it is not only what you teach to your students, but when. In other words, organization is critical.

This idea is one important reason why the interest of the students is not the ruling standard in preparing material or in determining a lesson. You cannot simply poll a class, find out what their urgent, burning interest of the moment is, and motivate the class by gearing your presentation to their interests. They may be following the proper structure, but it is just as likely that they are not. They may be very interested in some question for which they are not intellectually ready. They may have overheard their parents discussing something or they may have seen something on TV but that does not give them the intellectual framework to be able to learn this particular material. This is particularly true of many current events. Students have no framework to understand or interpret the material. This is a great flaw of progressive education: the idea that all we have to do is find something that the students are excited about or something from the headlines that is “relevant,” and gear the material to that. Interest does not mean readiness to learn. You do want the students to be interested, but many times you have to create the interest by a deliberate motivation.

This goes equally for the teachers’ interests. They are no more the standard than the students’ interests. Just because you, as a teacher or parent, are passionate about a given point, does not mean that that point should come first or that it should be the base of a whole course, or even that it should be included at all.

If interest is not the determinant of structure, what should determine, in principle, the proper structure in presenting material? This is where basic epistemology comes in. The essential determinant of structure is the hierarchical nature of the subject. To elaborate: from philosophy we learn that human knowledge varies according to its distance from the perceptual level. Knowledge starts with the directly given: what we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell. That is the self-evident, the obvious, the simple, and the unambiguous.

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