School work and the activities connected with school make heavy demands upon your time. If you are not careful, you will find yourself unable to do the things you are particularly eager to do. School life is planned this way in order to force you to budget your time and become a master of yourself, so that you may reap the full reward of this most responsible discipline. “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom” (Psalms 90:12).
In school work, as in sports, business ventures, and military campaigns, it is essential to have a plan of action. The student who develops system and regularity in study habits, budgets one’s time properly, and then adheres to the system and schedule has doubled the effectiveness of work and eliminated the worry and anxious anticipation from this, the most formative and important part of life. A schedule that is steadily followed soon becomes the easy and natural routine of the day. Constant repetition makes a good habit a part of the person who practices it. By following carefully the study schedule which you prepare, you can acquire that most precious of all knowledge—the power to work. You must build your schedule for work (and play) upon tangible and intangible factors: What are your capabilities? What are your limitations? What are your strengths? What are your desires? What are your aims? Only you can determine the value of system and schedule, only you can build within yourself an appreciation of the value of time, only you can determine a proper method of attack, only you can achieve system and regularity, and only you can realize the reward from time properly allotted.
The second basic tool in education is books. In another part of this book a whole chapter is devoted to this important tool. A brief acquaintance here, however, seems necessary. Books are the memory of mankind. They are one of the several important things without which our race would not be what we call “human,” as distinguished from what we call “animal.” This tool of education, this memory of mankind, this great legacy, this lever that lifted us out of savagery, this enables us to find ourselves. Here the aims of education and its purposes for us are made clear by the hopes, aspirations, conflicts, experiences, successes, and failures of people in time and space who are one with us. In books we become a part of the great drama which we call life. Without books education would possess no articulate spirit, and our function would be survival rather than aspiration.
The third tool in education is teachers. In a broad sense we are all teachers; by example we are teaching those around us. Here we are concerned with the teachers who serve as your partners in the greatest endeavor and undertaking of your life—your education. How must you use this tool? You can be shown “the high, white star of Truth,” and bidden to “gaze and there aspire.” You must be keenly aware that a partnership exists between you and your teacher. So often, students speak of doing an assignment, writing a paper, preparing a test, for ____, the teacher. You are not doing these things for ____; you are doing them for yourself. The great enterprise is yours; the teacher is a minor partner in the enterprise. The teacher can open windows of vision and point to horizons beyond, but the horizons belong to you. The teacher can be “as the shadow of a mighty rock in a weary land,” but only you can find shelter from sun, wind, and sand in the shadow of the mighty rock. The teacher is the guidepost for the journey, but the journey is yours. The teacher can light the lantern and put it in your hand, but you must walk into the dark.
REVIEW QUESTIONS
1 What are some of your natural gifts always ready to stimulate your desire to learn?
2 What are the three basic reasons for education?
3 Explain briefly what is meant by each of the basic reasons for education.
4 What are the three basic skills in education? Explain the third.
5 What are the three basic tools of education? Which is the most limited?
1John G. Nicolay and John M. Hay (eds.), The Collected Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1894, IV, p. 61.
2The author is indebted to the late Dr. C. Alphonso Smith, a great teacher, for the material in this paragraph.
3Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1950, p. 500.
4Albert Einstein, The World as I See It, Philosophical Library, 1940, p. 9. Quoted by permission of the Albert Einstein estate.
Using the Tools
The present is the only thing of which a man can be deprived. – MARCUS AURELIUS, Meditations
INTEREST MEASUREMENT TEST
1 Have you ever followed a daily schedule for work and play which you, yourself, made?
2 Do you frequently turn in assignments late?
3 Do you consider yourself thoughtless and rude when you are late to appointments?
4 Do you, without looking, know the name of the author of any of your textbooks?
5 Do you believe that, other than your parents, the people who will most influence your life for good are your teachers?
The secret of how to study is locked up in the desire to learn. Good students are not “born students”; good students are made by constant and deliberate practice of good study habits, and for this there is absolutely no substitute. The first of these habits is the proper use of time. Even though you feel that you cannot be the best student in your class, you will be surprised at the sudden improvement that will develop out of a sensible routine. Do not be frightened by the term “sensible routine”; it merely means order. Order presupposes that all-important quality which must come from within yourself—the desire to be a good student. This responsibility is yours. Your parents cannot wish it upon you, and your teachers cannot force it upon you. You must first want to be a good student.
“How can you take the greatest possible advantage of your capacities with the least possible strain?” asked Dr. William Osler of his beginning medical students. Then he would answer the question for them:
By cultivating system. I say cultivating advisedly, since some of you will find the acquisition of systematic habits very hard. There are minds congenitally [born] systematic; others have a lifelong fight against an inherited tendency to diffuseness and carelessness in work. Take away with you, from a man who has had to fight a hard battle, the profound conviction of the value of system in your work. To follow the routine of the classes is easy enough, but to take routine into every part of your daily life is hard work. Let each hour of the day have its allotted duty, and cultivate that power of concentration which grows with its exercise, so that the attention neither flags nor wavers, but settles with a bull-dog tenacity on the subject before you. Constant repetition makes a good habit fit easily in your mind, and by the end of the session you may have gained that most precious of all knowledge—the power to work.1
In order to form good study habits you must know what you are going to study and when you are going to study. Both of these important aids to study can be accomplished by a very simple device, a satisfactory plan book. One that might be recommended is the Student Daily Planner.* It is a compact little book, arranged so that your whole week’s work schedule and assignments are spread out before you.
The diagram does not give a complete picture. The space for each period is large enough so that you can also write in detailed assignments.
A carefully worked out study schedule is essential to good study habits. In the study schedule shown, the student starts the