How to Study

How to Study is by George Fillmore Swain, whose preface says the paper "has been suggested by a long experience in teaching" and that the writer has been "continually surprised at the ignorance manifested by students". The contents list names topics such as, among others, "Use of the dictionary", "Practice in definition", "Intellectual modesty" and "Wisdom rather than knowledge the aim".

The writer holds, in his own words, that "Every student should" take "a systematic course in logic, or carefully study by himself such books as Jevons' 'Elementary Lessons in Logic' or John Stuart Mill's 'Logic.'" The advice is that a student should practise "stating a principle perhaps from the mathematical point of view" and in "simple untechnical language that can be understood by one who is not a mathematician." The text cites Bishop Berkeley, who urged that we should "think with the learned and speak with the vulgar." Advice for a teacher is that asking a student "in a plausible way why some other and conflicting method or statement is not used" will "in many cases" show "that he had learned by rote and did not really understand."