Teaching Johnny to Think

by Leonard Peikoff

Why should these graduates of TV and car-repair magazines care if the great books of the past are burned by government edict—when they can’t read them anyway?

and, above all, a knowledge of the material being taught. Teachers must be masters of their subject; this—not a degree in education—is what school boards should demand as a condition of employment. This one change would dramatically improve the schools. If experts in subject matter were setting the terms in the classroom, some significant content would have to reach the students, even given today’s dominant philosophy. In addition, the basket cases who know only the Newspeak of their education professors would be out of a job, which would be another big improvement.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free . . . ,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “it expects what never was and never will be.”21

Education is systematic instruction of the young to develop in them the powers necessary for mature life.

Objectivity means grasping reality by some specific human method. It means using your consciousness in certain steps, according to certain rules, in order to discover the facts of reality. And that is the essence of a proper theory of education.

mind that has free will must be trained in correspondence to reality. It has to be educated, molded, taught, shaped, not just left alone to do its own thing. The goal of education is not freedom, certainly not freedom from reality. The goal is knowledge acquired by a thinking mind.

Education is the systematic process of training the minds of the young, both in the essential content and the proper method.

For obvious reasons you can’t teach everything so the content must be delimited to essential content. You have to be selective about what mankind knows; otherwise, you could run the entire school from kindergarten to university on what is known about worms.

Education is the systematic training of the conceptual faculty of the young, by means of supplying, in essentials, both its content and method. The purpose of education is to take a perceptual-level creature, and train him across many years, so that he emerges a mature, cognitively self-sufficient, informed being. And that is the principle that dictates both the curriculum and the instructional method.

The principle of motivation is this: show them that the skills they themselves want to have or might want to have depend on mastering this subject. The “might want” is critical. There are many things they do not necessarily want now but they might want some day.

For instance, if you are teaching reading and you come across the words “comb” and “tomb,” I would consider it poor teaching if you did not point out the common denominator—a silent b. That of course doesn’t seem like a very big thing to you, but it is a major connection in the child’s mind. Then, when you get to the word “knowledge,” and point out the silent k which is just like the silent b, only a different letter, he is one level of abstraction up. He is making an even broader integration.

material. What is clarity in conceptual material? Clarity is achieved when concretes are united by a concept and a concept is seen to be a union of those concretes. The two gravest breaches of clarity are: a set of unrelated instances that causes too much pressure on consciousness and a floating abstraction untied to reality.

Remember, a good lecture has three parts: 1. You say what you are going to say. 2. You say it. 3. You say that you said it. As simple as this sounds, it is absolutely true.

There are too many aspects to any complex thinking process to enable you to identify them and keep them separate orally. You must get your thinking in front of you in some shape that you can hold and slowly review and study from different aspects.

Practically speaking, when you want to subject your thought to analysis, you have to ask many questions of logic, context, and integration. Did I establish the context? Did I assume too much? Does my argument really hold water? Does this point follow from the preceding? Is this the best wording? What are my key points and how do they relate to one another? Can I see other connections among my points? Is my knowledge really certain or only probable? You cannot hold all this in your mind. The way to do it is to get some ideas and an organization written down.

Then you query, you scrutinize, you check, you evaluate and you rewrite. The rewriting (editing) is not just for other readers; it is primarily for yourself because it is the process of making your own thoughts clearer, more logical, and more exact. You constantly say to yourself: Do I know the definition of this term? Is this claim really justified? Why did I use this word? What does this passage add? What is the relation between this example and that?

For example, you could not teach political theory properly to an eight- or twelve-year-old because he has no way to judge or evaluate competing theories.

I was always puzzled by the fact that Ayn Rand majored in history in college. Why would she care what men had done in the past? As a moral philosopher, her concern was with what men should do with right and wrong. She said, “How am I supposed to know what men should do, apart from the facts of human nature? For that I have to study actual men, what they did and what the results were.”

I rejoined, “Why not just study the men around you today? Who cares what happened centuries ago?” She finally made this point clear to me. She said, “How will I know what facts represent man by his nature, and which are mere historical moods or fashions? If I look around today there is tremendous evidence for the desire for conformity. I know it is not true because I know there were the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. I know what man was like in a different era, and therefore I am able to abstract what is the essential that runs through all eras and conditions, and what is just a local variation. I can see what endures. I can discover which causes lead to which effects regardless of current fashions. I know what represents a principle, and what is just a chance variation.”

She convinced me that history was a prerequisite of value judgments—and a prerequisite of all theory and evaluation in the humanities. History is, in effect, the workshop for all humanities and social sciences, including philosophy. It is the factual base; it gives us the spectrum of what has been done, what has been ...

A student should emerge from a science program, not with the idea of how complicated reality is, but of how simple it is. Science should not be a survey of chaos, but an introduction to principles.

What history is to ethics and politics, what science is to metaphysics, art is to philosophy. Art is the data and the concretes of philosophy in specific, easily graspable terms.