Study Is Hard Work
BOOKS BY WILLIAM H. ARMSTRONG
A Study Techniques Handbook Through Troubled Waters Peoples of the Ancient World (In collaboration) Sounder Sour Lands The Education of Abraham Lincoln
Study is a Hard Work
SECOND EDITION
WILLIAM H. ARMSTRONG
Winner of the National School Bell Award for distinguished interpretation in the field of education and author of the New Award-winning book, Sounder
DAVID R. GODINE
Publisher · Boston
To my grandchildren, Chris, Katy, Rebecca
&
To all my students present and past who make, and have made, teaching an exciting and glorious experience
DAVID R. GODINE · Publisher Post Office Box 450 Jaffrey, New Hampshire 03452 www.godine.com
Second Edition
Copyright © 1995
by William H. Armstrong
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information contact Permissions David R. Godine, Publisher, Fifteen Court Square, Suite 320, Boston, Massachusetts 02108
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 67-10074
SOFTCOVER ISBN 978-1-56792-025-3
EBOOK ISBN 978-1-56792-506-7
CONTENTS
Foreword to the First Edition
Introduction
4. Getting More From What You Read
11. Letting Mathematics Serve You
13. Getting the Most Out of History
Foreword to the First Edition
On two matters college teachers, no more given to agreeing with each other than members of most professional groups, regularly express remarkable unanimity of opinion. College students, they agree, are commonly deficient in ability to express themselves well in English and, quite as commonly, deficient in effective habits of work. In some measure, the college teachers’ complaints may be dismissed as the traditional dissatisfaction of the old with the performance of the young. Yet college teachers are not all by nature quick to complain; they welcome skill in expression and diligence in study eagerly enough when they find it and presumably would be glad to find it everywhere. Since they do complain, therefore, their complaints would seem to have some foundation in fact. Often teachers in the schools reply, and quite correctly, that some jobs are never done, learning to write well and to study efficiently among them. And some insist that learning to write and, even more, learning to study are always specific, never general, skills; that is, that successful writing is writing for a purpose, and successful study, study that has a particular end in view. From this postulate they argue that the college must teach writing and skills of study quite as much as the school. In short, to each its own perplexities and solutions.
Like many pedagogical arguments, especially those centering on the development of skills, this one often ends in the slough of despond. Yet in the daily round of life, we all know well enough that we do develop general skills and that we do apply them to particulars much in the way our body absorbs food and distributes it in various chemical forms to all our members. It is manifestly impossible to learn skills anew for each situation we meet; we count ourselves well-educated when we have sufficient command of our faculties to adapt them effectively to new situations as they arise. Such command implies both the development of mental habits and an orientation of the will toward exercise of the mind. It is to that development and that orientation that Mr. Armstrong’s book is directed.
This little book is in many ways an unusual one. To begin with, it has a bluntness far from common in how-to books of any time or dime. Its delightfully perverse title is neither misnomer nor joke. The truth is, and always has been, that formal education (another name for accelerated learning) is hard. “Painful” is the word Aristotle used for it, a term Mr. Armstrong may have in mind when he writes “education without sore muscles is not worth much.” However suspiciously students may look on such a statement as representing the sublimated sadism of their elders, there is solid ground for the observation. Learning something new means altering our stability of the moment. The greater the strangeness or difficulty of the new information, the greater the strain put on our present, and comfortable, state of mind. If we must hurry to assimilate the new—as indeed we must—then we suffer not only from reluctance to disturb our equanimity but from the process of ingestion as well. Studying is hard, and the less students and teachers pretend that it is not, the better.
Mr. Armstrong is not a psychologist, nor does he make any pretense of being one. He is a schoolmaster in the old and half-forgotten sense of that admirable epithet. He obviously knows students, and he obviously knows how to deal with them. His theorizing is of the kind that the young understand and, even as they resist, respect. It deals not with stimulus-response data but with the deep instinct of young people for self-realization, for commitment to an ideal. In fact, for Mr. Armstrong studying is a moral matter first of all, a matter of governing the will—of accepting a right purpose and of concentrating one’s energies toward its achievement.
Today it is a bold man who dares to say that students have a “basic obligation” to work whether or not they are what is called “interested” in the subject-matter. Mr. Armstrong says just that and, in so doing, touches the matter of learning at its vital center. Schooling makes no sense at all unless it assumes that students have a basic obligation to study; and if they recognize that obligation, there need seldom be much need to worry about interest, for interest is the fruit quite as much as it is the stimulus of study.
Archimedes is supposed to have said that,